A Blight of Blackwings

by Kevin Hearne

  It made me wonder if Rölly had asked the Wraith about the Seventh Kenning or the Seven-Year Ship. If Saviič was so willing to talk about his faith, then perhaps the Wraith would as well?

  And I also wondered if Nara du Fesset had found Gondel Vedd in Fornyd yet.

  Fintan looked exhausted when we met, and I soon discovered why: People kept asking him questions about last night’s tales. The sorts of questions I had myself, for which he did not seem to have any answers.

  After the third interruption in as many minutes at the chowder house, Fintan looked at me, pleading in his eyes. “Is there somewhere we can hide?”

  I took him back to the Fornish restaurant we’d visited weeks ago, because they had some private tables screened by hedges and such, and it was also one of the few places that still had a reliable source of vegetables, since they ran their own greenhouses.

  We both needed a quiet day, and so we spoke little of outside matters while we worked. But Fintan had a surprise for everyone when he took his stage on the wall that afternoon. “I am going to sing you a love song today,” he declared. “For reasons. But I’m pretty sure they’re not the kind you’re expecting. This is a piece that proves everyone is perfectly beautiful as they are.”

  Sometimes I meet a person who’s neat

  Who’s got everything in its proper place

  And nothing is wild, their hair’s nicely styled,

  No blemishes on their face.

  But frankly I’m scared of people who care

  ’Bout everything being just so,

  Cause what works for me is asymmetry,

  Therefore, honey, you should really know:

  (Chorus)

  I love the mole on your upper lip

  The three hairs on it you’ll never clip

  I love how every time we kiss

  I get a bit of moley hairy bliss

  I know in the past you thought love wouldn’t last

  Because you never got a second date

  It makes me feel bad that they made you sad

  And honestly I cannot relate

  Because you are my type and, no, that’s not hype

  Or some sugary smoke I’m just blowing

  The thing is, my dear, your lip’s without peer

  And I hope your three moley hairs keep growing.

  (Chorus)

  Just give me moley hairy bliss,

  Yeah, just give me moley hairy bliss.

  There was a lot of shuddering and shrugs and people saying, “To each his own,” after that, and more than a few chuckles. But after the break Fintan said, “Only one tale for you all today: another long one from Tuala, master courier of the Huntress Raena.”

  The Triune Council granted me light duty at my request after the battle of Möllerud. I was expecting short runs in-country to deliver messages to local councils, but they gave me something else that was potentially more interesting—or more boring, or more deadly: escorting a stonecutter through the Gravewood in Ghurana Nent.

  I met him by prearrangment in Dunrae in an establishment called the Queen’s Meadery, with a sign outside featuring a magnificent bee on a bed of honeycomb. The master brewer was married to a master apiarist, and they knew their business. Comparing their product to all the other meadhouses I’d been to, I judged it the very best. It was cool and sweet and tart at the same time. I felt refreshed and pleasantly buzzed after only a couple of swallows.

  “Powerful stuff, eh?” the stonecutter said.

  “Powerful good,” I agreed, and he smiled, which did not annoy me at all.

  He was a lean, fit man in white linens, a choice of dress I found spectacularly optimistic. His jaw was outlined with a thin beard that he let grow to fullness on his chin, but he kept his upper lip shaved clean and his hair neatly cropped.

  “I am Curragh, master stonecutter of Dinae,” he told me when we met. His Jereh band, like mine, was bronze, and I saw his eyes note that. “So what did you do, Tuala, to deserve this assignment?” The corner of his mouth quirked up on one end.

  “I asked for light duty. I’ve seen some rough stuff recently.”

  “Fair enough. I’m surprised they considered this light, though. Rumor has it the Gravewood is unkind to travelers.” Again with the small smile. He liked his understatements. I liked his eyes. Wit and kindness danced behind them. Perhaps not a solid grasp of fashion, however.

  “It’s unkind to white clothing for sure.” It looked fine on him in the meadery, but it would be ruined within five minutes on the trail. “You wearing that tomorrow?”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t dream of it. This is only for special occasions.”

  “Drinking in Dunrae is a special occasion?”

  “On the eve of a job like this it is. We’re following a virgin trail to a new city with one—just one!—Raelech citizen. You’ve been briefed, right?”

  “I have. There’s a lunatic bard who’s hooked up with this band of Nentians and Hathrim, and he wants us to build him a nice road to get home someday.”

  “I can’t believe the Triune is sending us to do his bidding.”

  “Apparently he’s seen some shit and they want to hear about it. And they also want in on the ground floor of what could be a vastly profitable enterprise. Who knows what riches are hidden up there?”

  “Well, there you go. This is special. I’ve only ever worked on roads that were already carved out by others before this. Filling in ruts and shoring up shoulders, you know. Important work that saves many a blown axle, no doubt. But those gigs are over well-worn trails and almost always boring until someone tells a good joke. This job, though, is going to be dangerous. Maybe even deadly. Because gravemaws and murder weasels don’t care what meat they’re eating as long as it’s hot and fresh. This could be my last drink right here, you know? So I gotta wear the good linens for that.”

  “I see. So you have a different, more practical set of clothing to wear on the trail tomorrow?”

  “I do. Had it made specially, in fact. It is the color of dust.” This time his tiny smile gets me to laugh.

  “Good call, sir. It sounds like you’ve been repairing roads often. I’ve probably traveled them at one time or another. Which ones should I thank you for?”

  His list of credits was impressive, and I had indeed literally run across his work on many occasions. I hadn’t realized that some stonecutters specialized in roadwork.

  “And you did this with other couriers, I assume, or did you work at normal speeds?”

  “Often with couriers on light duty,” he admitted, “though occasionally at the much slower pace. Those jobs take forever.”

  “I imagine so. Which couriers have you worked with?”

  His list included Numa, and at her name I perked up and interrupted. “It’s Numa’s husband we have to blame for this. He’s the lunatic bard who made the request for this project through diplomats.”

  Curragh raised his glass. “To Numa’s husband, then.”

  I clinked his glass with mine. “To Numa’s husband.” We drank, and before we turned in, we promised to meet at dawn.

  * * *

  —

  Curragh really did have a set of leathers and underclothes the color of dust, and when he showed up the next morning wearing it, I laughed.

  “What? You thought I was joking about this? There’s no use fighting the earth on this point. Wear any other color and it will be this one by the end of the day. I figure if I start out this way, I win at the end because I meant to be covered in dust from the start.”

  We slid through the tunnel to Ghurana Nent quickly, using the lane to one side reserved for couriers. We passed plenty of traders, and they had their goods tied down as they should to guard against the wind of our passage, but we could never prevent t
hem or their animals from being startled by us. Wart oxen bugled and shat in our wake, and traders cursed and maybe shat also, for all I knew.

  I made a courtesy call on the viceroy of Ghuli Rakhan and at the Raelech embassy before we began in earnest, just to make sure there were no messages that needed to be delivered. I was given a satchel full of mail for many of the Nentians and a request for a status report from the viceroy. He also gave Curragh a list of names that should be inscribed somewhere on the waypoint bunkers he would build—memorial sorts of things, or else a weird payoff to political allies and cronies who thought there was prestige in having a bunker in the woods named after them. And then Curragh and I began our work.

  A laden cart on a good road could manage about five leagues a day. I didn’t know if the group ahead of us had been able to make that pace, since they were clearing trees as they went, but Curragh quickly informed me that we wouldn’t be able to make the typical ten leagues a day a courier and stonecutter covered on duty like this.

  “There are stumps and boulders all over the place to be submerged. If we don’t take it a bit slower, I won’t be able to catch them all and get the surface smooth and packed. And after that first downhill slope, I can tell I’m going to need to move around quite a bit of earth to ease the grades.”

  We wound up moving at my kenning’s slowest possible speed and only made seven leagues the first day, but we were both exhausted at the end of it. That was because, in addition to the work, we’d been attacked on three separate occasions by denizens of the Gravewood, and only my speedy application of a club to the head saved us. We each bore nothing more than some scratches to our leathers, but that sort of thing takes an outsize toll on a person’s stamina. If we saw a gravemaw, we were going to simply run as fast as I could manage, road be damned.

  The first bunker Curragh built was, by the viceroy’s request, far larger and more luxurious than any other he would erect along the way. It was to be named after King Kalaad the Unaware, whose final order before his murder had been to provision the colony we were traveling to.

  While Curragh slowly drew up the stone from the surrounding earth to construct it, I circled the site, hyperaware that something could be stalking us. I took care to watch the trees as well. There were meat squirrels and other arboreal predators to worry about.

  But I will share this: For all its ridiculous danger, the Gravewood was beautiful. The leaves of scattered deciduous trees were beginning to change, and the evergreen needles of the pines delivered a sharp fresh sting in the nose, welcome and friendly.

  Nothing more attacked us, and we were able to retire into the bunker to build a fire in the hearth. The chimney worked well, and I complimented him on the quick and competent build. I envied stonecutters their blessing sometimes.

  “Thanks,” he said. “That was a fine saving of my life you did there on multiple occasions today. I envy couriers their blessing sometimes.”

  It was so nearly what I had been thinking that I cocked my head at him.

  “May I ask your age, Curragh, or would you think me rude?”

  “I wouldn’t. I will tell you without expectation of reciprocity: I am thirty.”

  “I’m twenty-five.”

  “Oh? We must have just missed each other at the Colaiste, then.”

  “Only just. So to pry a bit further, why the bronze Jereh band? Handsome stonecutter and all that?”

  He snorted and grinned at me. “I don’t mind. You’re not the first to ask. Like you, I live a life on the road. Not ideal for the nurturing of relationships and tiny Raelech babies.”

  “Did someone shove you into this role as a one-man road crew?”

  “No, quite the opposite. I sought it. I prefer the road to the cities. In between the cities you see Rael as the triple goddess made it. There’s the smell of grass and wildflowers. Not so much the stench of tanneries and butcher shops and other markers of human existence.”

  “You’re edging toward the romantic there. You should have been a bard.”

  “Nah. They need audiences, and for that you usually need cities. I think I merely prefer the idyllic life to the urban. And look, Tuala: Consider me curious in general about you, but please don’t share anything you’d rather not. I won’t ask anything specific, because…well, we are practically strangers and you have no reason to trust me. And couriers are asked to do so much for us. But I enjoy stories by the fire.”

  I dug a candle and my steel flask out of my pack and tossed it to him. “Okay. Take a pull on that while I get changed. The leathers need attention.”

  “Eh? What’s this?”

  “Aelinmech rye.”

  “The Good Shit? For real?”

  “Yes, the Good Shit.”

  “Holy shit.”

  I lit my candle in the fire and left him in the hearth hall unscrewing the cap of the flask, while I went in search of a private room. There were plenty of them, and it dawned on me that I’d never seen a bunker built this way before. It was designed for large parties of people; multiple rooms had sleeping slabs racked along the walls. The privies—two of them with multiple stalls—were of a much more modern design than other bunkers I’d seen, incorporating the latest advice from Brynt hygienists for waterless operation.

  Choosing a slab in the last bunkroom, I unzipped my pack and took off my armor. The front was dusty and bug-splattered and even required a few stitches, where some hungry creature’s claws had tried to take off my leg before lunch.

  I unpacked my cloths and polish and emergency sewing kit and returned to the hearth hall, sitting on one of the stone stools Curragh had made. He held out the flask to me and I took a nice, burning swallow.

  “Thanks for the drink,” he said, then pointed at my supplies. “Goddess, that’s a lot of stuff you have there. It must take up half your pack.”

  “It does.” I began with wiping away surface dirt and cleansing the bug guts.

  “I like beautiful armor as much as the next person,” he said, “but it’s just going to look the same way tomorrow. Why not wait until we reach our destination?”

  Quirking an eyebrow at him, I said, “I thought this bunker was a destination now.”

  He chuckled. “You honor me.”

  “Good. It is what I do.”

  “Honor stonecutters?”

  “Not specifically, but yes. I meant in more general terms.”

  “Unsure I’m following you.”

  The pressure of my cloth revealed the rich red color of the thigh piece, and I dug into the deep grooves of claw marks to remove dirt and maybe a little bit of my dried blood before I got out my needle and thread. The claws had penetrated enough that they managed to scratch me, albeit shallowly. I needed to sew up the rent in my pants too. I shuddered to think of how shredded my leg would have been without the armor. Keeping my eyes on the work, I explained.

  “At the risk of earning your contempt, I am quite devout in my worship of the triple goddess, but Raena especially. I keep the words of her scrolls close to my heart, and she teaches us that there is honor in service and duty and craft when it is pursued with a pure mind.”

  “A pure mind? I’m not familiar with that phrase. And no contempt here, by the way, though I know why you might expect it. I am devout to Dinae and occasionally receive some scorn for it.”

  “Would you mind if I quoted you the passage?” I asked, replying only to his inquiry. People often said they were devout but did not back up their breath with deeds; they were the wind on the mountain instead of the mountain itself.

  “No, please do,” Curragh said. “I know it occasionally has its downsides, but a perfect memory is a wondrous blessing at times.”

  “Even so,” I replied, nodding. “Raena says: ‘One may perform service and duty and craft for selfish ends and be rewarded. One should always be r
ewarded, in fact, for service and duty and craft. But there is no honor in selfishness. Honor comes from selflessly performing service and duty and craft. Thus, pure work from a pure mind will not only be rewarded, but you will honor yourself and the work of your fellows.’ It goes on from there about the nature of honor, but that is where the ‘pure mind’ phrase comes from.”

  “Ah, thank you. But shoot the marbles for me here, since I don’t want to misunderstand: You are honoring people with your duty and service?”

  “Precisely. The Triune rewards me with a salary, but I give most of that to the temple. Keeping my leathers in their best condition is not only my duty but honors the craft of the armorer who made it. I try to live and work with a pure mind so that all are honored.”

  “Who did make your armor, by the way? It’s beautiful work.”

  “Master Simeagh in Aelinmech.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of him.”

  “He does some work for the Fornish, and in return they supply him a special plant-based grease for leather maintenance. I have no idea what’s in it, but it’s miraculous stuff. I use it often and it keeps my leathers looking new. Probably nobody cares but me. I think—no, I’m certain—that some believe I’ve had too many stones hit my head. But it’s important to me.”

  I looked up from my work to see that Curragh had leaned forward on his stool, elbows on his knees and hands clasped before him.

  “I find that…extraordinary. In a positive way. I joked about it earlier, but my armor and my clothing are the color of dirt because to me there is nothing more holy than to be clothed in the earth. I don’t clean it because it would be brushing off the goddess.”