‘She’s still weak from the birth,’ he replied, although the shrug of his shoulders showed he was as troubled as I was.
‘The birth was more than a month ago,’ I said. ‘My mother couldn’t understand why Nerigold wasn’t getting stronger back in Haywode. I’ve been watching her these last few days and I think I know why.’
Tamlyn’s handsome face took on its familiar solemn mask and after a few moments he looked away. He was waiting to hear me out.
‘It’s Lucien,’ I said, and I’d never uttered any two words that brought me more pain. ‘Every time he feeds from her, she becomes exhausted. It’s not supposed to be that way. I think he’s taking more from her than the milk every mother feeds her baby. I think …’
This was the hardest part, the terrible conclusion I’d come to. In all my weeks with Tamlyn I’d never seen him flinch, never caught him in a moment of doubt, but while I paused, with the worst unsaid, he drew in his shoulders as though cowering away from a vicious blow.
‘I’m worried that he’s drawing the life out of Nerigold,’ I said finally.
I wanted Tamlyn to turn on me harshly and tell me what a fool I was. An innocent baby. What was I talking about? He didn’t. Instead, he remained deathly silent for longer than I could bear.
‘Say something,’ I begged. ‘Please tell me I’m wrong.’
‘I can’t,’ he replied reluctantly. ‘I hope you are wrong, of course I do, but I just don’t know. What I am sure of is that there’s something special about Lucien. Coyle wouldn’t want him otherwise.’
‘But when a child’s father is Wyrdborn and the mother is from the commonfolk …’
He knew what I was getting at and didn’t spare me. ‘Lucien will grow up one or the other, Silvermay. There is no way to predict.’
‘But if I’m right about poor Nerigold …’
‘Then he’s sure to be Wyrdborn. My mother already thinks so. That’s why we’re going to Nan Tocha. She’s listened at doorways and spied on the messengers who’ve brought news to my father. Something’s been uncovered at the diggings, some secret of the Wyrdborn from long ago that excites the scholars. She’s convinced it’s the key to Lucien’s fate.’
‘Fate,’ I said bitterly, stealing a glance at mother and child asleep behind us. ‘I can’t help thinking … it’s your father who wants him. You’ve told me yourself what he’s like: a cruel man, who cares only for power over others.’
I paused, aware of the terrible things I had just said about Tamlyn’s father. A son should resent such words.
He turned his face towards me, as though he understood my hesitation. ‘It’s true, Silvermay. Say what you were going to say.’
How did I say it, though? In recent days, I’d discovered things about love that challenged the way I’d always gone about life. Don’t be afraid to say what you think: my parents had taught me that. Now, what lay treacherously in my mind would cut deeply into Tamlyn’s heart and because of that, just as deeply into mine.
‘Evil men seek evil ways. It’s something my father said when he spoke about the Wyrdborn. They care nothing for jewels and gold, or fine castles full of warmth and the tastiest food. They are never satisfied with what they have and always want more, even when it won’t make them any happier. They are never happy. Misery is their curse, and the more powerful they are, the more misery they bring to everything around them. If your fa—’
Tamlyn flinched, but finished himself what I’d been going to say. ‘If my father wants Lucien so badly, then whatever makes him special can’t be a good thing — not for commonfolk, not for anyone.’
‘Do you think it’s certain, then, that Lucien will become cruel and mean-spirited like other Wyrdborn?’ I asked. ‘Every one I’ve ever heard of was heartless …’ I stopped and almost burst into tears. ‘Oh, Tamlyn, I’m sorry. I can’t bear to think of Lucien like those two who came to Haywode with the religo. Could he be like you, instead? Why are you so different from the rest?’
‘Am I so different, Silvermay? I can feel that heartlessness in me. It’s here, a part of me.’ And he slapped a fist so hard against his chest that the hollow thud echoed around the trees. ‘If I’m not like others, it is because of my mother.’
‘Yet she is Wyrdborn?’
‘Oh yes, and I’ve seen her do terrible things, but there are times when she fights her nature.’
I thought of the night Nerigold and I had lain side by side sharing the misery of Tamlyn’s supposed death and remembered her words about Lady Ezeldi. ‘Nerigold said your mother was good to her, despite what was happening under her nose. No, not good,’ I corrected myself, ‘she was fair.’
‘To the Wyrdborn the two words mean the same. We have no reason to be fair to anyone. It brings us no reward, offers no warmth of feeling. But there is a goodness in my mother, I’m sure of it, and she has tried her best to give me a different life because of it. Birth is not destiny. She told me that over and over through my childhood, often with tears in her eyes. She wanted me to know tenderness, even if she couldn’t show it herself. She wanted me to care for others and know the feeling of being cared for.’
The way he said this took me back to Hespa’s jibe when we’d quarrelled. Can’t she call it love? she’d snarled, talking about Nerigold. Love wasn’t a word that came easily to Ezeldi’s lips, either, it seemed.
‘When I was twelve years old, she gave me two pups to raise,’ Tamlyn said. ‘“They are yours to care for,” she told me. My father called her a fool. “Dogs are for hunting,” he insisted. He wanted me to kennel them with the pack he kept behind the stables. The idea that dogs could be … played with, for fun, didn’t make sense to him.’
Tamlyn checked my face to see if I understood. And I did. The life of a Wyrdborn was becoming clearer to me, the life he had been born to live, and the more I learned, the more I pitied him. No wonder his mother had invented a mantra for him. Birth is not destiny.
‘Ezeldi helped me keep those dogs away from the rest, so they did not become brutal. I know now why she did it: she wanted me to feel sympathy for another creature, to know what it was like to have an animal depend on me. For the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be loved, even if it was by two furry balls of mischief. To a Wyrdborn, that’s the strangest feeling of all.’
In the days that followed, the slopes steepened and the air cooled noticeably until the peaks of Nan Tocha weren’t ahead of us, but surrounded us. We avoided the roads used by the donkey trains that carried the silver and tin down from the mines and looked for narrow foot-trails instead; some looked faintly familiar and I began to recall stumbling along paths like these with my cousins when Birdie had brought me to Nan Tocha years before. Not that I could tell one track from another and actually guide us anywhere, and I certainly didn’t know where the diggings were.
Once we saw a group of miners on their way homeward in the evening, but they were too weary to notice us through the trees.
‘The important thing is to stay out of sight,’ said Tamlyn.
The villages where the miners of Nan Tocha made their homes were easy enough to skirt around since they sent up constant columns of smoke, visible from a mile or two away. All was going well until I stepped into a trap set for a fox or maybe a wild goat and fell heavily, my leg held tightly.
‘Is Lucien hurt?’ I asked, trying to right myself.
Tamlyn was with me in an instant and lifted the baby out of the harness. The only harm was to his temper because he’d been peacefully asleep when I fell.
If the trap had been made of iron, with cruel teeth and a powerful spring, I’d have been done for. Luckily it was made of ropes, many ropes, which grabbed tightly around my ankle but caused no pain. As Tamlyn and I inspected the snare we saw it was an ingenious contraption that grew tighter the more I tugged against it, just as a frightened animal would do. Tamlyn traced the ropes to where they were staked securely into the ground just off the track.
‘Never seen anything like it,’ h
e said, his knife already in his hand. ‘Hold still. I don’t want to cut you as well as these ropes.’
I was quickly free, thanks to the razor-sharp blade. Any animal, with nothing but its teeth, would take much longer to escape and only if it had the wit to work out what was holding it. Thrashing and pulling against the grip of those ropes would get it nowhere.
‘Come on,’ Tamlyn said. ‘We don’t want to be here when the trapper checks his traps.’
‘Too late,’ said Nerigold, who had taken Lucien from Tamlyn while he freed me. She pointed along the trail to a lone figure who stood watching us.
He was about my age, I guessed. Taller, in that gangly way boys have when they grow suddenly. As he came closer for a better view of us, I saw his eyes stare out from a thin face half hidden behind matted and grimy hair the colour of cow dung. He flicked his hair aside, revealing a look that mixed distrust with wide-eyed fascination in about equal parts.
‘Who are you and what have you done to my trap?’
‘It snared the girl’s leg,’ Tamlyn said plainly. ‘I had to cut her loose. You should be more careful where you set your traps.’
‘No one comes along this path any more, just animals and the odd goat lost from a herd. They pay me a royal for every one I find.’
Tamlyn stepped in front of Nerigold and I knew why. He was trying to keep Lucien out of sight. How we talked ourselves away from this boy might well decide whether we remained free or not. It might also decide whether we lived or died. The trick seemed to be working because the young trapper hadn’t so much as glanced at Nerigold. He was only interested in me.
‘Silvermay,’ he said suddenly. ‘That’s your name, isn’t it? You came here a few years ago. I grew up with all your cousins. Do you remember me? Ryall.’ He held out a filthy hand.
I did remember him. Not his face, but his name. He’d been there when my cousins had deserted me in the darkness of the abandoned mine, giggling and hooting ghostly sounds louder than the rest. He’d run on ahead of us whenever we went exploring paths like this one, always pointing out things we missed to show how clever he was. He was a noisy, exasperating pest with far too much confidence in himself and he’d hung around us for the entire visit until even my cousins began to hide from him.
I shuddered and took a closer look. His clothes were ragged and as dirty as his hands. His belt drew my eye: it was the only neatly organised thing about him. All sorts of ropes hung from it, some as thick as my finger, the thinnest little more than a few strands of hair woven together. They were carefully graded according to size, the longer ones looped many times and tied around the middle to keep them from becoming tangled.
He saw me inspecting them. ‘I make all these ropes myself,’ he announced proudly. ‘Use ’em to set my traps. The tools of my trade, you might say. I’m the best trapper in Nan Tocha these days. Just ask anyone in the villages round about. That Ryall, they’ll say, he can catch anything. Caught a wild cat that was raiding their chicken coops once. Better than working down the mines, anyway, and no rocks can fall on your head like happened to my father and all my uncles.’
That was another thing I remembered about him. He was an orphan who’d lived with my mother’s sister as a kind of extra; she’d taken him in because no one else would. Looking at him now, it was easy to see why.
‘He knows you,’ said Tamlyn, who had given up trying to shield Lucien from view and come to my side.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘This is worse than if we’d been seen by a goat herd. We might as well have stayed on the road and let the passing donkey trains look us over.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling stupid and a little angry, too. What did he expect me to do about it?
‘We can’t afford to let him go,’ Tamlyn whispered. ‘The way he never shuts up means he’ll talk about us to everyone he meets, and before tomorrow morning every ear in the mountains will have heard about Silvermay Hawker and the young couple travelling with her. Anyone searching for us will know just as fast.’
‘Can’t let him go. What do you mean?’
Tamlyn stared at me coolly. ‘He’s a danger to Lucien and the rest of us, just like that hawk.’
The hawk. It slowly dawned on me what he meant. At first I thought he was making a joke out of the problem. He wasn’t. If I’d needed any proof that Tamlyn had been right about the ruthless streak of his kind that he shared, here it was.
‘No,’ I hissed. ‘He’s a human being. There’s got to be another way.’
He looked doubtful.
‘All that talk of being fair,’ I said, ‘it has to be for everyone or it doesn’t mean anything.’
He was listening, but to be sure I had to convince him in some other way. Could Ryall be of some use to us? Then it came to me.
‘Have you heard about the digging going on in the mountains somewhere?’ I asked the boy.
‘Of course. All of Nan Tocha knows about that. Strange bunch of Vonne folk. We stay away from them mostly.’
‘Could you take us there?’ I asked.
He took his time answering, as though weighing up whether he could spare the time away from his traps. He would have answered more smartly if he’d known Tamlyn was going to kill him unless he said yes.
‘All right,’ he announced brightly. ‘Anything for you, Silvermay. It’ll be fun to have you around again.’
I groaned.
‘These diggings had better not be far away,’ I whispered to Nerigold when we set off behind Ryall’s lanky frame. Or maybe I would let Tamlyn kill him, after all.
13
The Diggings
We were in Ryall’s hands now and didn’t he love it. If he’d been a dog, his tail would have fallen off from so much happy wagging. Ahead of us on the track he loped, over rocks and rivulets, his body all angles and thin lines, sending up puffs of dust where his large boots slapped into the dirt. There was none of the lithe grace with which Tamlyn slipped through the landscape, like a fox.
Every hundred paces or so, Ryall would stop to let us catch up, always waiting until he caught my eye. When he did, he’d grin shyly, turn back to the track and press ahead. There were no words, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hear his thoughts. Are you pleased with me, Silvermay? those glances asked. Is there anything more I can do for you?
Yes, there is! I felt like shouting. Let me forget you’re even here!
Ryall knew his business, though, thanks to the many times he’d hunted on these mountainsides alone.
‘This path leads between those two hills,’ he told us, pointing. ‘It’s not far after that.’
‘I can smell smoke,’ said Tamlyn, and when we searched the sky above the trees, we saw four separate fingers of blue-grey clearly in the distance. ‘A village.’
‘Donadey,’ said Ryall, unconcerned. ‘The folk there don’t use this path. There are better ones, with less to trip over.’
And, as though demonstrating his last words, his toe caught on a tree root and he had to grab at a sapling to stop himself ending up face first in the dust.
‘Maybe you should stick to them, too,’ I said unkindly.
‘Not if we want to reach the diggings unseen,’ he answered, unhurt by both his stumble and my words. Without being told, he’d worked out that we were travelling in secret.
With Nerigold needing frequent rests, an hour passed before we reached the hills, and another two before we were through to the other side.
‘We’re getting close,’ Ryall told us.
I turned to Tamlyn. We couldn’t simply stroll into the camp without a thought for who might be there or how many. ‘Ryall can stay with Nerigold,’ I said, shifting Lucien, ready to hand him to his mother.
But Tamlyn pressed Lucien back into the harness. ‘No, Ryall knows the way. You take Lucien and Nerigold off the track in case a woodcutter or another roving boy surprises you.’
He pointed towards a bulge of grey granite that curved out from the sloping ground above us, far enough
from the trail to offer shelter. By the time we reached it, he and Ryall were already gone.
‘What do you think we’ll find at these diggings?’ Nerigold asked when she was comfortable with her back against the rock and her arms outstretched for Lucien. She didn’t sound any more hopeful than I felt.
‘I can’t even guess,’ I answered honestly.
‘A horse with wings or a boat that floats on air instead of water. Either would be good,’ she said wearily. ‘Anything that means we don’t have to walk any more.’
My lips were curling upwards at this wonderfully preposterous dream when Nerigold spoke again.
‘Silvermay, behind you!’ she said urgently.
Tamlyn had left the bow with me and I quickly had an arrow ready on the string. But what was I to shoot at?
She saw my hesitation. ‘Up the slope, near that large birch tree. Do you see him?’
Still unsure if a rogue had come to kill us or if she’d sighted one of the wildcats Ryall had boasted of hunting, I scanned the trees with my eyes. There — a flash of blue out of place amid the dull browns and green. It moved and became a man’s shirt.
‘Has he seen us?’
If he hadn’t when I started the question, he had by the time I’d finished, because he suddenly stopped in his tracks to look down at us.
‘What’s he doing off the track?’ I whispered to Nerigold. ‘If he’s going from one village to another, he should be following the path.’
‘Hunting, maybe?’ said Nerigold.
The man had begun to move again, downhill towards us, taking halting steps because of the uneven terrain.
‘He’s no hunter, not in a bright blue tunic,’ I told Nerigold.
He was no miner, either, I saw as he came closer. The men we’d glimpsed yesterday wore rough homespun pants and tunics like Ryall’s, all in the creamy greys and pale browns of undyed wool.
I felt the bow’s weight in my hands. He was close enough now to put an arrow through his heart, but if I did that without knowing whether he was truly a danger to us, I was no better than a Wyrdborn.
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