Wynter awoke with a start and tried to get his bearings. The full light of the moon through the cabin’s small windows created shadows and silhouettes. He wasn’t by his own bed. He was standing with a single arrow in his hand, and he strained his eyes and realized there was a pallet in front of him. The thin silver light showed several reedy sticks standing up from the pallet as if they were planted in the ground. Wynter didn’t want to accept what his eyes were telling him but all the same he moved forward and out of habit, reached to collect his arrows from the throats, and hearts of Ned and Eula. In a state of shock, he cleaned each shaft and blade on the woolen blanket that covered the couple and then, lifting it by the hem, he covered their heads and made his way to the patch of floor where the children slept. It was silent there too. He examined and removed from their small lifeless forms two kitchen knives and drew up their blankets as well.
Wynter walked, almost as if he were still asleep, back to the cooking area and took as much food and supplies as there were and stuffed it all into the sack Ned was going to prepare for him. Ready for travel, he looked cooly around the cabin and restoked the fire until it blazed orange, and then he lit another fire on the bed of Ned and Eula and another in the kitchen. In a few minutes, the cabin would be a beacon to any neighbor who happened to be awake and Wynter would be gone.
“You killed the whole family,” Wynter’s wife’s voice muttered emotionlessly to him as he walked toward the woods. “You killed our whole family. Killer. Murderer.”
Wynter smiled as he walked dismissing his wife’s voice in his head as he would ignore the cries of someone else’s baby. That’s right, he thought, that’s what I am. Just what you’ve asked me to become. Again.
TWO
“I’m heading to the outpost at Steven’s Folly with a small supply train. The captain says if there are people who will be useful, I can take a few along.”
The words, Lydria knew, were an invitation. Her father, Cargile, was a soldier of Wesolk, and since she was a baby she had followed him wherever he went. She eagerly accepted his invitation and started gathering her needles and thread, and some bits of leather and cloth that might be useful at the Folly.
Since her mother had died bringing her into the world, Lydria had worked in some capacity with her father. When she was young, she carried water or helped the cooks. She was brought up by the wives of soldiers, especially when the army was on the move, who nursed her as a baby and provided for her as they could. But it was Cargile who raised her, and he did it the only way he knew how – like a soldier. She was taught to hunt and fish, how to fight, how to handle a knife and a sword. But her real skill was with a needle, although not in the making and repairing of garments, although she was quite skilled in that regard, but in helping the surgeons sew flesh and muscle. No one was finer with a needle and thread. Soldiers bragged about their fine white scars to peers who possessed huge white masses where their skin had been sewn roughly and hurriedly together by less skilled or more drunk assistants.
A trip to the outpost as seamstress meant work and money, which she saved to help her father for when he was no longer strong enough to swing a sword or wear armor. The trip came on the heels of an unusually long winter that kept that kept both the healers and the gravediggers busy. After such a hard season, being with the first supply wagons was a wonderful opportunity for Lydria, who would be kept busy every waking hour repairing the uniforms and other clothing of the men at the Folly.
“We’ll be leaving in the morning. There will be others with us,” Cargile said, winking at his daughter as she sifted through a basket of fabric.
The ‘others’ were sometimes the betrothed of the soldiers at the Folly, sometimes shop keepers, tinkerers, peddlers, cobblers, or cooks. But more often, they were simply women who would make a lot more money over the course of a few days than Lydria ever would. Still, she would make use of her time on the way, making those women loosely-sewn clothing that would turn her a fair profit from their profession as well.
Cargile seemed to read the expression on his daughter’s face and smiled. Lydria was a pleasant woman, but not fair. Her fingers were long and thin, perfectly suited to her work, but she would never be mistaken for a frail or fragile woman. She was shorter by a forehead than most women her age, and her hair was dark and straight, matted to her head as if she kept it covered with a helmet. Her mouth was generous, her chin was strong but not masculine, and her cheeks were low, which often made people think she was sad, unless she was smiling.
Being raised in the army Lydria had sensibilities more common among soldiers than wives. Cargile made it a point to often tell her she was pretty, but she knew better. As a seamstress she’d seen the curves that made men think women were pretty. She possessed very narrow hips and a nose that had been broken at least twice. She was, she knew, unremarkable except for her eyes. Her father had often said her eyes were exceptional – “the right as blue as a perfect summer sky, lit by flecks of silver like moonlight; and the left the green of a pine tree in front of a rising sun.” It was the closest her father had ever come to being poetic.
“This will be a small company,” her father said. She realized he had stopped for a moment as she drifted into her own thoughts. “After this miserable winter, we will be the first of several early wagon trains,” he said at last. “Bring what equipment you need. We will be staying at the Folly for a couple days and returning directly. That’s our orders.”
Lydria smiled. One of the things she loved about her father was his simplistic way of looking at everything. It was either this or that, black or white and there was no room for anything in between. He explained to her as a child that orders were to be followed, not questioned. There were people with long titles in grand tents and wearing uncomfortable shoes who asked the questions. When they arrived at the answers, they gave orders. It was simple that way. When too many people had a say, he had told her, competing interests and personalities and emotions, especially emotions, got involved and nothing of note was accomplished. He was a soldier, and simplicity made his life easier. He had opinions, but he didn’t share them often with anyone other than Lydria.
The next day they were heading north along a road that followed the Great Lake’s shoreline leaving Bayside, the capital city of Wesolk and its relative comfort, to life on the road, hunting, sleeping under crude tents, and living with the land. Lydria knew that life suited her father better than life inside the town’s walls. Cargile was telling her of how Wesolk had been created with the help of their ancestors. It was an old story Cargile told every time they left the city, and Lydria was happy to listen if only to watch her father smile as he told it.
Decades earlier Bayside had been a small fishing village, but wars and refugees had brought farmers and trade and some measure of wealth to the area. It had also brought a king - Aric who was the first King of Wesolk.
Aric had united several communities south and east of Bayside and created Wesolk, a sizeable kingdom for himself and his people. Cargile told Lydria that her great, great-grandfather, Carg the Younger, had fought by Aric’s side at the Demigod Hills, a small series of foothills to the south of the city, and the scene of the battle that created Wesolk. Soon after Aric took his throne, and two princes from the west saw in Aric an easy target. A young king rumored to spend most of his time buried in books, who had just finished a war for existence, would be an easy target, they thought. “They thought wrong!” Both Lydria and Cargile made the announcement in unison, eliciting laughter from the wagons behind them. Cargile always made it a point to say the phrase when he told the story of Carg. The two princes, her father continued, joined Aric in battle in the foothills of the Godsmouth Peaks, at the eastern edge of the plains that marked Wesolk’s border at the time.
Learning of the plans for invasion, Carg helped Aric set a series of traps and deftly moved his own army up into the Godsmouth and back along the slopes to come down behind and flank the princes, catching them between the well-provisioned a
nd battle-tested army of Wesolk on the plains, and a mobile force coming down from the mountains behind them, cutting off their supplies and reinforcements.
The battle raged for two days and during the second night, three of the enemy prince’s commanders stole away from their lines to meet Carg and sue for peace. Aric told the three commanders to hold their forces from the field, and the next day, the combined might of Wesolk descended upon the fractured army and destroyed it. The princes were taken captive and hung, and the commanders given dukedoms in the lands of the former princes in return for fealty to Aric. The borders of Wesolk now extended east across the Godsmouth to the shores of the Eastern Sea.
Now, with Aric’s great-grandson, Ahlric, on the throne, Bayside was developing into a large, walled city with a small but capable standing army. At the center of the city was a great keep and what would soon be the largest castle north of the palaces of the kings of the southern deserts.
Lydria leaned across her horse and patted her father on the knee and thanked him for the story before turning away and riding to the back of the wagon trains.
From a distance, Lydria could be mistaken for a man. Her shoulders were broader than most women, and the way she sat a horse, and even walked, gave her shape no distinctiveness from a distance. There were two other women in the party, who rode on the supply wagons to ‘keep the drivers company’ and they wore plain linen dresses with the sleeves pulled up above the elbows, tied with bits of colored yarn. Neither wore shoes, although Lydria knew the luggage they shared contained dresses and shoes and even some face paint which they used while they worked. Lydria laughed to herself as she considered that sitting next to the wagon drivers they might be at work already. She nodded to them and they smiled back, happy to have another woman along who wasn’t in competition with them for money.
The trip to Steven’s Folly would take more than a week. It was a pleasant journey and the weather atypically fine for the middle of spring; a blessing after the devastatingly cold and long winter. By the lake shore the fires of Bayside were kept strong for months in the face of severe snow. In the Godsmouth’s to the east, even as the land hinted at the edge of summer, the snows were still far lower on the peaks than they generally were for the season.
The riding was uneventful, broken only by the occasional visit from a scout, a hunter, or a resident of an outlying town looking for news and an opportunity to sell wares or food. Cargile was always ready and generous to townsfolk who approached the wagons and he never failed to tell his soldiers how the people outside the city provided the food and labor that made Wesolk possible. “We can never forget,” Cargile would say, “that when we kneel to the king, we also kneel to his subjects.”
The group moved slowly across the muddy track following the contour of the lake and it was another three days before they arrived at the ferry launch, the closest point between the mainland and the island town of Thrushton. Despite the amount of cargo that transited the dock to and from the island each year, it was barely more than shack that the merchants of Wesolk had begged their king to enlarge for years. Still, it served its purpose, so the king saw no reason to spend money to make it larger, and the merchants couldn’t decide among themselves who would pay for repairs, so the launch a perpetual ruin.
As the road beyond the ferry was narrower and less well maintained, Cargile ordered the wagons to stop while he spoke to speak the ferry master who was sitting near a dilapidated dock that looked as if the past winter had only just left standing. The docks tree stump pilings were rotting and tilting in odd directions, causing the deck to roll in much the same way a ferry might in rough waves. There was no ferry in the water, but Cargile could make out the outline of the craft underneath heavy canvas sheets, pulled a short distance onto the shore nearby.
Cargile took a small flask from a pocket Lydria had sewn on the inside of his tunic and offered it to a bearded old man staring out at the water. “A little something to take the chill off, eh?”
The old man hardly moved, only his arm and hand made their way up to grasp the small, hardened leather container, which he lifted even further in thanks before taking a long pull. His eyes never came off the water line – even as he emptied Cargile’s flask.
“What are you looking for, Lem?” Cargile’s tone was gentle with the old man, but he was genuinely curious. Old Lem had run the ferries for years and was usually good for a story, a bit of fish, and a smoke if one had the patience for the stories. But the old man continued to watch the water like a statue.
“Thing is,” Lem said at last, in the whistling punctuated voice of an elderly man with a shortened capacity for breath. “T’aint seen a boat yet this year. Should’a been boats by now. Always boats as soon as the ice breaks.” And then he looked up, and Cargile met the man’s eyes and together they looked back to the water.
Lydria watched the exchange between the two men as she hitched her horse to a tree. It was mid-afternoon, and they had only a few more hours of daylight so it was unlikely they’d find a better spot to rest for the evening. The landing also brought the possibility of trade and news, so even the women riding in the carts were busy setting up camp for the evening, gathering wood for a fire and preparing food. Still not being able to hear her father’s discussion, Lydria moved to join her father and ask Lem if he’d like to joint them for supper.
“I thought a’first the weather musta damaged their boats some,” Lem supplied to Cargile after a thoughtful silence. “When a storm as ter’ble as what we got here comes through and as fast as it did, chances are boats aren’t in, and some are gonna git crushed in the ice.” There was a pause as if Lem were contemplating what he was going to say next, and Cargile let the pause run a long while before the old man continued his thought as if uninterrupted. “That dohne ‘splain though why they ain’t used their spare boats. They got plenty a’ spare boats. Always ‘ave spare boats, do islanders.”
Lydria had joined them but Cargile was so engaged he didn’t hear her approach. Lem turned to look at the girl and saw she was intent on the island, and he saw the brow above her blue eye arch upwards and her mouth open just a little as if she wanted but were afraid to say something. “Your girl figured it out Cargile,” Lem said with a gap-toothed grin. “Tell him what you see, girly.”
“There’s no smoke.”
“That’s right.” Lem nearly shouted the words, as if excited to have his guess confirmed and not be thought a lunatic. “The ice broke up more than a week ago, so I say to my wife, ‘Murnah, I’ve got to get to the landing to see what it is the islanders will be needing’.”
Lem was at the landing every year as soon as the ice broke, waiting on the first small boat from the island with a list of provisions. He’d have someone, usually his son, go to Bayside to gather the supplies while he got the ferry ready for the trip to Thrushton.
“No one has gone out there, have they?” Cargile asked, an edge of concern and firmness in his voice that demanded a no-nonsense answer.
Lem was back to staring at the island and humming lightly to himself, his tongue kept his bottom lip in motion as if he were trying to work a piece of food from between his teeth. “T’aint nobody been out there from this landing since fall. Our only boat is there,” he said, pointing to the canvas roof Cargile had noted earlier. “And between us, young Cargile, I t’aint stupid. I know the signs of a plague when I see it.” He handed the empty flask back to Cargile who mutely accepted it, gave it a wistful shake, and tucked it back into his tunic.
The camp was set up and a fire lit. The two women and the wagon drivers were becoming fast friends and Lydria noted the women didn’t have their own tents set up. She gave them a smile and a wink by way of congratulations which they returned with wry smiles. While she didn’t want to be in their line of work, she didn’t disapprove of it altogether. You worked at something or you didn’t eat, as her father had told her. It was as simple as that.
After giving Cargile back his flask, Lem took two fishing lines from
his shack when he and Lydria’s father cast into the water from the edge of the decrepit dock. Lem happily assured the group that if he couldn’t catch dinner he would clean the dishes. Within minutes the wagon drivers and soldiers were placing bets on who would catch more dinner, Cargile or Lem. The last bet was barely in place before Lem had two large trout flopping on the dock and had cast his line back into the water for a third. “I t’aint got no ‘tention of doin’ dishes,” he whistled to Cargile.
The drivers had bet on Lem in the hopes that the king’s uniformed men might pay for their nights’ diversion, so when the old man called out that he had a big one on the line, they cheered out loud. Lydria laughed as she raced back to the dock to gather the fish flopping in a small bucket near her father’s feet.
“What in the name of every bastard in the kingdom do you have there, Lem?” Cargile reached down to help the old man bring the line in and he called to Bracknell and Josen, the soldiers who traveled with them. The soldiers were on their way before Cargile finished his sentence and he soon fell to his stomach and thrust his hand into the lake, dragging something to shallower water where Lydria and the soldiers were waiting. As Cargile moved toward the shore, they all saw the pale, bloated body of a person. The torso, legs, arms and even the face were large and expanded from water, but the skin was mostly intact, save some from the fingers and nose where most guessed the fish had had a nibble.
Moving the body gently to shore, Cargile ordered Bracknell to fetch an old blanket. Handling the body was delicate as the waterlogged skin collapsed under all but the slightest of touches, and the smell was like a farm at slaughter time, and worse for knowing where the smell came from.
“This looks like a boy,” Cargile said. “But I don’t see any visible signs of plague on him. Do you think he was trying to find help?”
Magic's Genesis- The Grey Page 2