The boats also brought trusted couriers who collected sheaves of secrets from Sweetwater. The letters they gave us told us when to watch for the prison boats. It was rumoured that the High Mistress was also told about any political matters which might affect our work, but I doubted it. Nothing on the Mainland really affected us, and none of us cared about the people who lived there.
While the visitors walked to the tower, the servants filled their boats with things to trade. There were crates of weak, diluted potions which cure everything from impotence and sleeplessness. The weapons we had ‘blessed’ were packed into rolls of linen painted with nonsense runes. We even sold scraps of paper with idiotic spells scrawled on them. I could have written fifty of them in an hour. In return, we were given seeds and raw metals, gemstones, cuts of salted meat and fish, ambergris and an endless array of fabric.
We did not need money; we took enough from the dead.
When I was summoned to speak to the visitors I found out that my tongue could tie itself into knots. I had memorised answers to every question a prisoner might ask, but the visitors were not on the island to be seduced. Thinking of my own words was painful, and confiding in a man I could not use my arts on made my palms itch with nerves. They thought I was shy, which amused the other Siren no end. Their teasing made me even more self-conscious.
I had left the island, and my sisters had not. I had been a peasant. When I saw anyone from the Mainland I was sure that they could read poverty on my face. How could a nameless brat speak to a lord? I always loitered at the back of the crowd and slipped away as soon as I was able. If I had to report to one of the couriers, or describe one of Dahra’s new tonics to a merchant, I kept my head lowered and my voice low.
I had spent an entire month with a cleric who had practiced dark rituals on the older members of his flock. The man had confessed his crime, but some of his congregation were up in arms about his arrest. I needed to explain exactly what nonsense the man had chanted into their zealot ears. The lord who spoke to me was quiet, and he looked ashamed as he heard what his people had been doing.
“I should feel worse,” he told me when I tried to sympathise, “I had no idea what was going on. I failed my people as much as they failed me.”
“Will you punish them?” I imagined his villagers bringing burning torches to the edge of the moat. The lord looked at me as if I had insulted his beloved mother. I was too embarrassed to apologise, and so I simply turned on my heel and walked away.
Somebody laughed. My eyes flicked up angrily, but the man had not been laughing at me. He shoved his hair out of his eyes and snorted. Something about the gesture was so familiar that I stopped and stared. I did not know any Mainlanders. It was impossible for me to recognise this man. But then he turned, and I knew him in an instant.
Jonas.
His laughter struck me like a tolling bell. For a horrible moment I thought that he had washed ashore with the other victims. He wore the sturdy oiled cloak of the visiting Mainlanders, and his eyes were clear and lucid. He was safe, then. I breathed out harshly and he looked up at the sound.
I could see that he did not recognise me. How could he? I had been a child when he had run away, and nearly twenty years had stretched between us. Now I was a woman with coiled hair and veiled eyes. Jonas wouldn’t have known me even if I ran over to him and leapt onto his back.
I ran to the servants’ wing and begged Janine for the key to the haberdashery. I searched through the boxes until I found a short, soft feather. I carried it back to my room and took my herb case out of the cupboard. I had almost lost hope of finding the right herb when I found one wedged at the bottom. I crushed the large, swollen leaf and lay the feather in the sticky sap. As soon as the bright blue gel had stained the feather, I ran out of my room and back to the tower.
I beckoned Jonas away from his companions. He frowned but followed me easily enough. For some reason his willingness made me jealous. I took the feather out of my pocket and, biting my lip, handed it to him. He turned the tiny gift over in his fingers, and a small smile lit his face.
“Clay?” he whooped out a laugh and clapped me hard on the back as if we were still children, “I wondered if it was you!”
“Oh, come on.” I folded my arms in a hugely undignified pose and pursed my lips. “There’s no way you recognised me. Why on earth would you think I’d be here?”
“Hey, you can control the river god. Where else would a sorceress end up?” he ran an appraising eye up and down my body, whistling softly. I reddened, and he scratched his nose, “You’re as ugly as ever, I see. I knew dumping you in all those puddles would make you go wrinkly.”
One of the other Siren looked over, frowning, when I snorted, “Before you recognised me you seemed ready enough to fall into my arms.”
“I’m not here to fall. Isn’t it forbidden?” he sounded both serious and teasing at the same time, and I couldn’t work out if he was making a joke. Some of the visitors acted as if we were sacred beings; others pawed at us in dark corners. Jonas had always been as irreverent as the day was long, but he had watched the river flee from me. His eyes clouded with the same memory, and he cleared his throat. “I’m here to find a Siren.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. I just need a Siren. Your High Mistress said we could take one, but only if they agree to come. She doesn’t think anyone will want to. She can bask in her helpfulness as she does absolutely nothing.” he grinned and shook his head. “She’s a con artist. I thought she was supposed to be a goddess.”
That made me laugh out loud, and I clapped my fingers over my mouth, “Did you say you wanted your Siren to go with you? Go where? To the Mainland?”
“I’m not looking for a Siren for me.” he read my speculative expression with a scowl, and then waved away my amusement.
“So you’re married?” I goaded him, and then the questions came pouring out in a flood. “What happened to you? Did you ever go back to Singen? Did your mother…?”
He held up his hands, laughing. “It’s nice to see you too, River.”
“You didn’t answer my…” I shut my mouth with a snap. I couldn’t be offended. It was only Jonas. He was about as threatening as a dormouse. He had the same nose, the same ears, as the boy I had played in the mud with. I probably looked just as freckled and skinny as I had, and I was still a good foot shorter than him.
To give myself a chance to breathe, I took Jonas’s arm and led him to a grove by the orchard. The benches were overgrown with ivy and spiders crawled over our arms, but at least we were further from prying eyes.
“How did you end up here?” He asked.
“I’m not allowed to…”
“Oh, don’t be stupid.” The man retorted, flicking a spider off his knee. “I made it here too, didn’t I? There’s nothing mystical about climbing into a boat.”
“Fine. Then I came in a boat.”
“What an interesting story. The Siren kidnapped you and hired you as a servant. They must sing about it in taverns.”
“I’m not a servant!” I burst out, offended. Then I clapped my hand over my mouth, because those words could have condemned me. The Mainlanders were told that the Siren were otherworldly creatures, born on the island or immortal. The girls who they paid for were trained as servants, not as equals. I lowered my eyes and pressed my hand against my throat. “I mean, I am a… I should have said…”
“Don’t fret.” Jonas said shortly, and then flashed me a smile. “Did you hear them calling me sir, back at the pier? What do you think they’d do to me if they found out I grew up carrying pails of pig shit?”
I relaxed. “You didn’t answer any of my questions, sir.”
“As you command, Lady Siren!”
CHAPTER 19
Jonas had grown up in the shadow of the Singen cliff. After the flood, he wanted to live in the sunshine. He climbed to the top of the cliffs and scaled the heights. His parents had borne children in the same way other people collected sea
shells – small oddities crammed into every corner of their home, with the oldest ones quite forgotten in the crush. Being in the woods was liberating. He lived in the wilderness for so long that his hair grew long and his shoes wore away. He learned to fish, hunt, find clean water and make a shelter. When he finally grew lonely and tried to settle in a town, Jonas did not recognise his own voice. He had become a man without realising it. He had planned to beg for work, but he could hardly pass for a waif with his broad shoulders and cocksure grin.
He slept in the lumber yards, splitting logs for copper lorets. Over time, the little woodcraft he had learned from his father returned to him. He built a crude shack and filled it with handmade furniture, tools and a vagrant woman called Tonja, who shared his bed until the snows melted and then slipped away in the spring.
One night, an unguarded oven set the baker’s house alight. The blaze spread to three other lodges and killed six people before it was extinguished. The peasants rebuilt their homes with stone rather than wood. Jonas had no great love of stone, and so he sold his furniture and walked away.
The woods were darker and colder than he remembered. He could not stay in one place for more than a few months before he started to hate it. The mountain passes he had coasted through as a boy turned into muddy goat trails, which slipped and crumbled under his heavy feet. Every city he passed beckoned to him, and yet his wanderlust drew him away. There were guards at every gate, and the sick and the dying begged for alms on every paved road. He could taste the pox in the air.
Jonas was too naïve to understand that the world would never get better. He was sure that all he had to do was walk far enough. He spotted a great mountain range in the distance and headed towards the jagged peaks. As the ground became more treacherous he slowed down, trading months of manual work for crude climbing gear. He was warned that there was no way through the mountains, but he would not listen.
When he reached the foot of the great, looming mountain he looked up at the sky and decided that the warm weather would hold for long enough for him to explore. If he couldn’t find a pass, he would turn back and try again. At first, it was an easy climb. He sheltered in the lees of the rocks, and he slept soundly. He lashed his bag firmly to his chest to free his arms when he needed to crawl up chimneys of rock.
Jonas had been travelling for three days when he reached a sheer sheet of ice, hundreds of feet tall. He dug his ice picks into it and forced his way to the first plateau. It took him three agonising hours. He was blinded by the wind, and when he thirstily caught snowflakes on his tongue they refused to melt. His arms screamed after an hour, and after two he was so exhausted that the picks felt like iron weights. When he dragged himself over the lip of the wall he sobbed, and the tears froze on his cheeks.
Jonas found shelter and slept for a few hours, but the cold made his toes feel like fractured glass. He knew that if he fell asleep again, he would die. He trudged onwards, forcing his exhausted body to obey. He told himself that if he stopped moving, he would never get to see the top of the mountain. His determination was as strong as his fear, and he scaled the rocks without caring about how he was going to climb back down.
It was hard to breathe at the summit, but when he looked down he caught his breath in shock. There was a jagged tumble of rocks to his right hand side that littered the mountain like seeds on a loaf of bread. He had studied them from the bottom, but had decided that the risk of a single rock fall was too great to risk. As he stared down he started laughing hysterically.
He could see a way back down to the highlands.
There was a thin passage between two of the bread-seed rocks, which hid the trail from the ground. Jonas could see a crumbling rock ladder which brought the climber safely out below the ice sheet. It looked easy, but the man could see many dangers. When he had been below the plateau a shelf of rocks had groaned above him. The only sliver of a path had been concealed behind that cunning twist of rock. A whisper of sound might force those boulders to fall. The trail might crumble under his feet. Jonas told himself that all he had to do was lash rope across the drops to create an easy climb to the ground. He was trembling with excitement when he looked up and into the horizon.
He had never seen buildings like it before in his life. They glittered in the sun like jewels.
The mountain he had climbed was part of the border between the Mainland and Altissi. The two countries shared a landmass which curved like a crescent around the inner sea. The peaks promised death for anyone stupid enough to cross them. For hundreds of years the mountain range had kept our countries apart, but a single stubborn man had worked out a passage that even an inexperienced mountaineer would be able to struggle through.
Jonas realized this in a few seconds, and his heart leapt into his throat. He wanted to scramble backwards into the arms of his own country, but he had to be certain. Now he hoped that the trail was deadly. He struggled onwards.
He had to fight for every step. When he had to abseil down the rock his frostbitten hands screamed. He had to tear open the cloth around his trail cake with his teeth when he wanted to eat. He slept knowing that he might not wake up the next morning. He was frightened, but some part of him hoped that he would die. At least then nobody else would know how to cross the mountain.
He found dangers – a creaking shelf of snow waiting to fall, a glacier which made the ground so sheer he had to slide his feet rather than walk - but then the ground started to become more level and he finally had to admit that the climb was behind him. He looked back. The peak was lost in the clouds.
The people of Altissi looked different to the Mainlanders. There was a certain lightness to their bodies which was at odds to the sloping limbs of the mountain people. Their eyes were far more piercing – a side effect of living in a country of great open plains and not close, shadowed peaks. Jonas looked so ragged from climbing the mountain that the peasants who took him in did not think to look twice. At first, they believed he was a trader who had lost his way. They reasoned that he owed them for their care, so they snatched his coin purse and shook out every piece of it. When they saw the straight edges of the Mainland coins they locked the feverish man into the cow barn.
He ranted and roared, upsetting the cows so much that they started to low along, until there was such a cacophony that the villagers couldn’t bear it. They whispered about witchcraft. There was no way the vagrant could have crossed the mountains. It was as if he had appeared out of thin air. It amused me that the villagers treated Jonas in much the same way as the people of Singen had treated me. They refused to see him as human. They sent a rider to the nearest keep and begged their tithing lord to intervene.
Jonas woke from his fever in a soft bed, with his head and feet pillowed on goose down. He sat and his hands flared in pain. He lifted them in front of his eyes and saw clean bandages hiding misshapen lumps. One hand was missing its smallest finger; the other had a ragged scar where the cold had consumed every digit from the outside until his middle finger. He wondered why his palm looked deformed to him, and why he was indifferent about the missing space. He hadn’t realized how broad his palms looked without fingers framing the edges.
I could describe the room he woke up like this: it was so glorious that my friend forgot to worry about his fingers. That was all he said to me, and I believed him.
Jonas had never seen luxury like it. Mainland towns were built into fissures in the valleys, and only the wealthy had large, symmetrical rooms. Villages were built from lumber, which was easy to replace after the flood seasons. Jonas had expected Altissi to be the same. This room was large, and warm, and there was even a small pane of glass which let light in from the lazy sky. The walls were painted with murals and the furniture smelled of beeswax.
Jonas stood up carefully, found himself to be naked, and decided that between his safety and his modesty he’d do well to find a weapon first. The maids were rather surprised when they opened the door and saw a naked man trying to unsheathe an ornamental letter ope
ner with his teeth.
They probably weren’t too upset about it, either. Jonas’s years in the mountains had given him a lean, muscular build that suited him. The servants turned and shut the door – a little too slowly for my friend’s taste – and then giggled through the keyhole that they were going to fetch their master. At this point, Jonas decided to find something to wear. He greeted the lord of Svetnin wrapped in two pillowcases.
“I’m sorry.” The lord said, trying not to laugh. “Your clothes had to be burned.”
“After this, you’ll probably want to burn your bed linen, too.” Jonas said stiffly. The other man was silent for a moment, and then he burst into loud guffaws.
The lord acted like he had met Jonas in an inn. The servants brought in crystal jugs holding coffee and cream. The next time they appeared, they had trays of breakfast foods. It was odd that even though they were so efficient, they forgot to bring Jonas something to wear. Jonas eventually exchanged his pillowcase for a warm cotton robe, and wondered why it had flowers stitched onto the pocket.
“I think you’re making fun of me.” he said, fumbling at the ribbons with his aching hands. “Is that how you punish prisoners?”
“Prisoners?” The older man looked shocked, and then another laugh grumbled up from his belly. “You misunderstand. You’re my guest. You’ll be free to go the moment you’re healed, but I was hoping you might malinger a little and amuse me.”
“By dressing up in women’s clothes?”
“That was your maid’s notion, not my own. It’s a flattering colour, but I agree that it doesn’t quite fit you. I shall summon my tailor after luncheon.”
Jonas hid a look of disbelief. “My maid?”
The lord looked into his cup, and poured more coffee into the dregs of sugar in his cup. “My serfs told me that you were a demon. I am too much of a cynic to believe in such things. If you are not one of the fae, then you are a mortal man who has scaled the mountains. You have done something truly exceptional. There are too few people like you in this world, and I am honoured to have you as my guest. There, is that enough of an invitation for you?”
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