Fann led them up a well-trod dirt path the following morning. With the sun approaching noon, Dante stopped in front of a roughstone manor. Three round towers filled out its body, four stories high and equally wide. Two-story connectors linked the silo-like wings. In the fields beyond, wooden barns and outbuildings stood above the young green fields.
A light breeze ruffled Dante's hair. He glanced at Fann. "I guess you should...announce us."
"Don't be silly, my lord." Fann gestured up the gravel path. "We're in Tantonnen now. If you send your servants ahead to 'announce' you, the locals will look at you like you've asked for a golden toilet."
"We should get one of those," Blays said. "I've always thought our silver seats were declasse."
"Any other helpful advice?" Dante said.
Fann tapped his delicate fingers together. "They're not fond of shaking hands. Perhaps because theirs are always so dirty. In any event, doing so will brand you as an outsider. Furthermore, deposit your boots at the door unless you would like the head of the household to deposit his between your buttocks."
"I think that's enough." Dante dismounted and crunched up the path. He thumped the knocker of the banded wooden door. A middle-aged man appeared in the doorway, stocky and stubbled, his round gut and swollen biceps placing equal strains on the fabric of his brown doublet.
"Is Lord Brant in?" Dante said.
The man smiled. "Unless I've been overthrown in the last five minutes." He turned and bellowed back into the house. "Jilla! Have I been overthrown recently?"
"You will if you don't knock off that hollering," a woman called back.
Brant chuckled and turned back to Dante. "Looks like I'm still the lord." His gaze dropped to the two brooches on Dante's chest. "You must be what's-your-name. From Narashtovik."
"Dante Galand." He didn't offer his hand.
"Thought you'd be older. Well, come inside. Your friends, too. I'll send a man to see to the horses."
Dante had plenty of time to take in the household as he picked the knots from his boots and placed his footwear beside the door. Hard winter light gushed through the windows of the large round room. The windows were glass, and fine-stitched rugs covered nearly every inch of the wooden floors, but there was a simplicity to the room beyond the informality of the baronet who owned it. Above the fieldstone fireplace, a ho rested across two pegs, displayed as proudly as a knight's blade.
"The same one my ancestor used to first break these fields," Brant said, catching him looking. "Scrub off the rust and I'm sure it still could."
"Nonsense," a woman smiled from the stone staircase. "You'd rather churn the dirt with your own teeth than let that old thing touch open air."
"I said it could," Brant said mildly.
The woman was his wife, Jilla. While she made introductions, Brant trundled off to dispatch riders to inform the local lords of the group's arrival. After a lunch of pork, potatoes, and the best bread Dante'd ever tasted, Brant brought their horses back from the stable and led them on a tour of the estate.
"We'll have dinner tomorrow," he told Dante, rolling atop his cracked leather saddle. "And tonight, of course. Imagine me taking you in and then leaving you to fend for yourselves!" He laughed, voice carrying on the flickering wind. "That's when we'll speak, I mean."
"That's fine," Dante said. "Our time isn't so precious just yet."
"Still, I'll try to help you make the most of it. I have a rough idea why you're down here. I'm sure your offer will be a right one. But don't bet your winter on it being snapped up."
"Don't tell me they're afraid of the king."
"Why would they be? All he's got is an army. And a mountain of gold. And a kingdom of people who think no more about beating a norren than a donkey that's stepped on their foot."
Dante laughed. "I'll modulate my expectations accordingly."
Brant filled the rest of the day with small talk about how winter had treated him, his expectations for the approaching spring, and questions about Narashtovik, which he hadn't visited in twelve years, meaning he'd seen none of its resurgence with his own eyes.
"Last time I saw the place, it was empty as an old man's mouth," he said during their post-dinner discussion, his socked feet propped on a chair. "You make it sound like it could sit next to Setteven in the jeweled crown of Gask."
"Not quite yet." Dante sat down his beer, a blueberry- and clover-tinged lager Jilla had brewed over the winter. "But 'The Dead City' is getting to be a more ironic name by the day."
Brant nodded, uncharacteristically quiet. "Things change fast, don't they."
Dante went to bed not long after. His room was snug and draft-free. In the morning, Brant brought them to town after breakfast to show off Shan's windmills and irrigation canals. It was a simple place. Built to last. If war came, Dante hoped it spared these windy fields.
Brant's fellow baronets arrived that afternoon. Like Brant, most of the six lords showed signs of long days on the farms despite their noble titles, their forearms ropy, their faces tanned and lined. Their opinions were as large as their shoulders. Their appetites, too. At the long feast-table that took up most of the lower floor of the second wing, they sat at attention while Jilla blessed the food (a stripped-down version of the ritual that involved a couple words and a couple flicks of saltwater from her fingers), then fell to the meal like it would be their last, disassembling roast chickens and vegetable pies faster than the two servants could bring out the next dish. Steaming bread appeared by the platter: puffy white loaves; round disks studded with nuts and grains; moist, crumbly slices embedded with raisins and dripping with butter; flatbread smeared with almond paste.
Dante assumed this wealth of breads was just an extravagance of the feast, but over the next few days, he learned it was entirely standard for Tantonnen. Almost every meal involved their staple crop in some way, be it in the wrapper of boiled pork dumplings or in the pan-fried slabs that Tantonners carried as portable meals, pie-like medleys of boiled meat, raw nuts, potatoes, and vegetables all mashed up and held together with a glue of oily dough. These were the most perfect invention Dante had ever seen.
As normal for such gatherings, the lords' dinnertime talk stayed light—how the last snows had treated them, the town cloudsman's predictions for a mild spring. Finally, the farmers toyed with chicken skins, juice-soaked bread crusts, and their fourth beers of the night.
Unprompted, the oldest of the men, a thin and wind-chapped man named Raye, pointed a chicken bone at Dante. "So what is it you want from us?"
Dante swallowed beer to clear his throat. "You've heard, I'm sure, of the recent unrest."
"I'm sure."
"We're not friends of any war, but we are friends of the norren. We fear that, if invasion comes, many innocents will starve."
Raye bunched up his gray brows. "Do you think? Most I've seen do plenty well leeching off the land."
"Plenty of them live in towns just like you or me," Dante said. "If an army marches on its stomach, towns and their granaries are the stepping-stones they use to cross the river of conflict."
"Now that's a pretty metaphor," said a fat lord named Vick, his tone much drier than his beer-foamed beard.
Blays clunked down his mug. "That's because he's too dumb to say stuff straight. Thing is, civilians will starve. You've got food here. We want some of it and will pay money to buy it."
"Oh," Vick said. "When you put it like that, it makes sense enough."
"But not why Narashtovik gives a sheep's shit," Raye said.
"We sympathize over common suffering," Dante said. The faces of the baronets were cowlike, slump-jawed. He clenched his teeth and let a long breath through his nose. "I'm from Mallon. A few years ago, I hardly knew a thing about Arawn, except that he'd scythe off your head if you spoke his name over open water. Because anyone who did talk about him—the real Arawn, the Arawn of Narashtovik and Gask—got their head hacked off. Whipped, at the very least. Which is funny, because that's exactly what happens to any no
rren slave who decides he doesn't want to be a slave anymore. Why does Narashtovik support the norren? Because Setteven is full of shitheads. Maybe they'll march. Maybe they won't. But if they do, we want to be there to pick the norren back up as soon as the king's done stamping on their backs."
That drew a few wry chuckles. Brant smiled and scratched his neck. "None of us are too happy about those tax-mad shitheads, either. They could cut our levies in half if they weren't so obsessed with clinging to every scrap of their creaky empire." Brant leaned back, chin inclined. "I'd be happy to sell whatever wheat I can part with. But it won't be as much as you want."
"Why's that?" Blays said.
"Everyone needs bread when the swords come out," Vick said. "And when food's needed, farmers need it most of all. They're the first ones the men with swords come running for."
Dante gazed at his plate. "Leaving you with little left over to sell."
"That's the shape of it," Brant said.
"Of course," Mourn piped up, "the bandits don't help."
At some point during the dinner, Mourn had left his satellite table to stand against the curved wall, being careful not to lean against its tapestry of a deer silhouetted on a ridgeline. As a result, he was directly behind some of the lords, who had to turn their heads like owls in order to join the others in staring at him.
"Bandits, you say?" Brant said.
Mourn nodded. "The norren bandits. Unless they are human bandits doing a very clever job of pretending to be norren."
"You know that how?" Raye said slowly. "You running with them?"
If Mourn was insulted, he didn't let it show. "They've left signs all over your roads and fields." He nodded at Vick. "If you're who they mean by 'the fat one,' they're going to take your eastbound caravan this weekend."
Vick bolted up, knocking back his chair. "You are running with them!"
"He's been with us for weeks," Dante said. "Before that, he belonged to a clan that lives a hundred miles from here."
Brant gestured Vick back into his seat. "There anything you can do about this? Or just tell us things we already know?"
Mourn glanced between Dante and Blays. "That's up to my chiefs."
"How much have you been losing?" Blays said.
"Between guards, payment, and product?" Brant shook his head at the ceiling. "All told, a tenth of what I take out of the ground."
Blays drank the rest of his beer to hide his grin. "Here's the deal. We take out the bandits, you sell that ten percent to us. At half market rate."
Raye scowled. "Two-thirds."
"Half."
"Sixty per—"
"Raye, you're missing sixty percent of your brain," Brant said. "Half's a whole lot better than none." He extended his hand to Dante, then shook with Blays and Mourn as well. "You clear the roads, you got your grain."
That settled the matter. With the business of business complete, the assembly turned to the business of getting drunk. By the time Dante got to bed, head spinning, he had all but forgotten they'd pledged to rid Tantonnen of an entire clan of norren.
Hangovers made the morning slow to materialize. Dante picked over his breakfast of toast and eggs and sweet soppy cheese. Blays joined him, took one look at his plate, and set his head down on the table.
"What did we commit to?" Dante said.
Blays didn't move. "Ask that shaggy mountain of ours."
"Are we going to have to kill a bunch of norren, Mourn? Because that doesn't strike me as a very productive way of helping them."
Mourn looked up from window where he sat reading one of the manor's books. "I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"I mean in a very literal sense—I don't even know whether Blays is going to vomit in the next five minutes. How should I know how it will go with a gang of violent bandits?"
Dante rolled his eyes. "How were you thinking it would go when you butted in last night?"
The norren shrugged his heavy shoulders. "That depends on the clan. I'd listen if someone told me we'd be overrun and butchered unless I stopped stealing."
"Then all we have to do is find them."
"Not hard. Not if you know how to read their signs. Which I do."
Blays nibbled a corner of Dante's toast. "Why would they leave big old directions all over the road?"
Mourn stared at his oversized hands. "Because if you are a clan in a hostile land, that makes you a thing that is a threat. A horde of bandits. An army. But if the clan splits up, a person sees one norren. Three norren. They don't think much. If you're a chief, how do you bring your scattered clan back together when it is time to act or move? You can shout very loudly. You can set signal fires that can be seen by everyone with working eyes. Or you can leave signs so small your enemies will never know you're there."
Dante sipped his tea. "But you can find the signs to find them, too."
Mourn shook his head. "I don't need wildsigns to find a clan."
After breakfast, Dante found Brant and informed him they'd set out shortly. Brant sent a man to prep their horses. Dante located Fann, who was holding a lively conversation with the farrier, and waited for a break in the talk.
"I was thinking you might find it more comfortable to stay here."
Fann smiled slyly. "What a polite way of saying I might get myself killed."
"You don't mind?"
"Not at all." Fann doffed his round black cap. "As you pursue the art of war, I will once more turn to the art of speech."
The horses' manes and tails had been clipped and combed. Mourn led the way down the path to the main road, scanning the ruts and weedy shoulders, clinging to the saddle of his plowhorse. Wind stirred the long grass.
"See anything?" Blays said after a mile of travel.
"Hmm." Mourn leaned forward, peering into the grass. "They say the young blond one is very homely."
"And the norren wonder why everyone hates them."
Mourn twisted in his saddle, giving Blays a stony look that soon softened into a smile. "It's a good thing I know you."
Blays tipped his head to one side. "I wouldn't go that far."
They reached the road into town by early afternoon. Mourn led them east at a casual walk. A few times an hour, he pulled up, dismounted clumsily, and crouched beside a stick or sprig of grass. His examination of bits of plants and dirt reminded Dante of divination, of reading the guts of unfortunate turkeys, but Mourn moved with a stolid purpose. Mid-afternoon, he cut south from the road into an unplowed reach of crumbling hills with grassy heads and dense thorny trees in their folds.
"They're around," Mourn said. "But unless we are better at this than I think we are, we probably won't see them until they want us to."
"Why would they want us to see them?" Lira said.
"Because there is a certain joy in revealing yourself to the thing you are about to kill."
Mourn rode cautiously and inexpertly through the grass and rocks. Snows hid in the deep shadows between hills. Blue-throated birds perched on bare twigs, peeping questions back and forth. They left the last of the carefully-tilled fields behind. Here and there, huge boulders stood alone in the flatlands, as if dropped there by a forgetful god.
When people spoke of the oldest places, they often mentioned mountains. Forbidding mists and unclimbable spires. What they really meant was that mountains were pristine; no one had any business in the icy peaks except for hermits and the insane. But people could live in this undulating prairie. To Dante, the fact they chose not to—or once had, but abandoned the place long ago—made the silence and wind more primordial and unknown than the most remote crags.
Mourn got down from his horse to proceed on foot. He mumbled to himself, gazing at flattened grass, his words stolen by the wind.
"What's that?" Dante said.
Mourn glanced up. "I said they know we're here."
"Send you a letter, did they?" Blays said.
"Sort of." The norren bent down and pointed to a branch of a jagged shrub. T
wo of the thorns were snapped at the base, dangling by narrow fibers. "This says 'hello.' That they used thorns means it is not a pleasant hello. Although maybe they only used them because that's all that seems to grow out here."
Dante shrugged. "At least they're breaking thorns and not our arms."
He dismounted to better read the trail for himself. Except for the clan's deliberate wildsigns, which Mourn mostly had to point out himself, the usual markers were in short supply—a scuffed rock here, a stomped leaf there. The day dwindled. When Mourn shook his head at the dusk, they descended to a crease between hills and set up camp.
"Build a fire if you like," Mourn said. "If they want to find us, they will."
"That's comforting," Blays said. "Well, if we're going to be stabbed in our sleep, I'd prefer to die in a warm bed."
He and Lira stoked a small fire. Dante pan-cooked potatoes to go with their bread and jerky. He pulled second watch. When Mourn woke him to change shifts, Dante found a dead rabbit and sent it to circle the hills, but he didn't see a single norren during his watch.
Throughout the morning, the wildsigns drew Mourn further and further east. The day was a bust. After an identical dinner to their previous supper, Dante twiddled his brooch. A moment later, Cally's disembodied voice spoke into his ear.
"So where are you right now?"
Dante smiled at the old man's tangible excitement. "Chasing wild geese through the plains of Tantonnen."
Cally laughed. "This is incredible, you know. I've had to resist summoning you up every night to find out the latest."
"Same here." Dante filled him in on the negotiations with the baronets and their as-yet fruitless hunt for the norren bandits. He could almost see Cally nodding along.
"If anything big is stirring in Gask, it's so large no one knows what they're looking at yet. I'll let you know if anything changes. For now, I advise continuing your search."
"Will do."
"I bet it's cold there, isn't it? We've had the most wonderful inland breeze. Not that I've noticed in my warm little tower."
"Goodnight, Cally." Dante cut off the link. That night, the wind felt as cold as wet iron.
The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy Page 71