by Ann Marston
Medroch stepped forward to meet us as we mounted the steps. He held out his hands and Cullin put both of his into them, bowing slightly from the waist.
“Welcome home, Cullin,” Medroch said, his voice deep and mellow. His eyes, grey as smoke, clear as water, turned to me. “Leydon’s son?” he asked.
“Aye,” Cullin said. “I’ve brought him home.”
Medroch searched me up and down in frank appraisal. “Ye favour your father,” he told me. “But you’ve your mother’s eyes. Be welcome here, Kian dav Leydon. This is your home.” He held out his hands to me.
Following Cullin’s example, I placed my hands in his and bowed. “Thank you,” I said, and my voice sounded rusty and hoarse.
Cullin greeted his brother warmly, placed a kiss on Linnet’s upturned cheek, then presented me to them. In a daze, I acknowledged the introductions and stood in a stupor as Linnet kissed my cheek and bid me welcome. When I turned again to Cullin, I found him standing with his arms around Gwynna, kissing her with a fervency and enthusiasm that belied his wry phrase, agreeing to disagree. He finally stepped away from her, bent to scoop up both children into his arms and brought them over to present them to me. They were shy, but both gave me smiles.
“There’s a meal waiting,” Linnet said at last. “Cullin, take Kian to the bath house and both of you get cleaned up. We’ll serve the meal when you’re finished.”
***
Cullin and Gwynna retired to their suite for three days, appearing only occasionally for meals. Again, it didn’t quite fit with Cullin’s ironic description of their marriage. When I commented on their absence the first evening Cullin and Gwynna failed to appear for dinner, Rhodri threw some light on it for me.
“It’s a strange relationship, ye ken,” he said, smiling. “For the first while, they canna keep their hands off each other. Ye couldna get a sheet of parchment between them.” He laughed. “You wait. By the end of the fortnight, they’ll still be standing close, but it’ll be nose to nose and toe to toe, arguing about everything from the way Cullin trims his beard to the way Gwynna mends the girls’ smocks. They won’t admit it, but they love each other with a grand passion. They just canna live with the other for long.”
I made a noncommittal reply and returned to my meal. But I smiled.
***
Sympathetically aware of my sense of strangeness, everybody left me alone for the next few days, letting me adjust at my own speed. I wandered the Clanhold, exploring the rooms and corridors, studying the rows of portraits hanging in the Great Hall. I paused before one of them, a painting of a young man, redheaded, grey-eyed, with a smile very much like Cullin’s, but clean-shaven. He wore a bonnet with a sprig of rowan tucked behind the clan badge, the plaid secured at his shoulder by an ornate brooch fashioned to look like a leaping stag with a large, yellow stone glittering between its great rack of antlers.
“My son, Leydon,” Medroch said at my shoulder, startling me. “Your father. That was done just before he left the Clanhold, about three years before you were born.”
“Is there one of my mother?” I asked, still looking at the portrait. Even though I could see the likeness to myself in him, Leydon dav Medroch was a stranger. I could not remember him at all.
“We have no portrait of Twyla,” Medroch said quietly. “She never wanted one done.”
I nodded and he left me to continue my exploring.
The language came back first. I don’t know when it was I suddenly realized that I not only understood everything being said around me, I was as fluent with Tyran as they. Cullin had used the language with me during our journey south, but I had stumbled and stuttered when I tried to speak it. Here at the Clanhold, it came naturally and easily, and I pondered that development in silence.
Then one day about a sevenday after we arrived, I wandered out of the house and found my way to a high cliff overlooking the sea. On some instinct, I followed a narrow little track until I came to an enclave tucked into a tumble of rocks. A thicket of silverleaf maple, salt-bitten and twisted, clung tenaciously to the stony soil among the rocks. I found a moss-covered stone in the sun and sat, watching the breakers crash against the cliff wall on the opposite side of the small bay, sending spume purling high into the air.
I looked up as a shadow fell across me. Cullin stood there, dressed only in kilt and shirt. “I used to come here and watch the sea,” I said quietly. “And I gathered eggs on that wall over there.”
“Aye,” he said. “Ye did. This was one of your favourite places as a child. Is it coming back then, Kian?”
“Some things,” I said. “Only a little.”
“Well, it might never all come back to ye,” he said. “But ye ken that you’re home.”
“I’m home here,” I said. “In this spot. But not in the house yet.”
“Ye can stay here, if ye wish,” he said. “Or ye can come wi’ me when I leave again.”
I looked up at him. “I’ll come wi’ you,” I said. “I canna feel I belong here. It’s too grand for the likes of me.”
He laughed. “Aye,” he agreed. “I’ve always felt that way myself.” He stood for a moment, watching the sea birds circle endlessly over the water, searching for fish. Then: “I’d be pleased to have you with me, Kian,” he said quietly. “I’ve grown fond of ye these last seasons.”
The feeling of relief that swept through me caught me by surprise. Pleased by his words, I grinned up at him. “Was I worth the five silver?” I asked.
He considered that. “Aye,” he said gravely. “I expect so.” He touched one of the silver-chased hilts at his belt and laughed. “In any case, the daggers certainly were.”
A fortnight later, we left Broche Rhuidh for Honandun and another merchant train. That began a pattern we were to follow for the next seven years—traversing back and forth across the continent with merchant trains, and once every year or so going back to Broche Rhuidh to see Cullin’s family. We seldom stayed more than a season at the longest, and most visits were only a few days longer than a fortnight. It was a rhythm of life that suited us both. Cullin’s small band of guards was much in demand and we never had to seek contracts actively. The merchants came to us.
Cullin had an easy manner with both the guards and the merchants. He possessed the ability to fit himself deftly into the company of nobles and soldiers, merchants and farmers. When the occasion demanded, he could out-lord the haughtiest of noblemen and the next minute, be down on the floor of a tavern, drinking ale and throwing dice with a troop of soldiers. He had the happy faculty of blending seamlessly into his surroundings. He spoke at least six languages, not counting Tyran. When he undertook to teach me, I discovered I, too, had a flair for languages and he informed me that was something else I had inherited through my father from my grandfather.
He also undertook to teach me manners. All I remembered was living as a slave. Under Cullin’s tutelage, taking my cues from him, I learned how to comport myself in any company and found out I also had a good flair for acting.
Cullin had been right about my growing. Over the next several years, I stretched up to within a thumbs-length of his height, but fell short of his weight by nearly two stone. The active life spent mostly outdoors and the work with the sword gave me a man’s shape to match my height. In a kilt, shirt and plaid, and a golden topaz on a fine chain in my left ear by the braid in my hair, I looked as much the Tyran clansman as Cullin. We made a good pair. And some time in those years, we slipped effortlessly into the relationship of foster-father and foster-son more than uncle and nephew. It was comfortable for both of us.
***
Nennia came unexpectedly and startlingly into my life not long after I turned twenty by Cullin’s reckoning. Cullin and I had come home to the Clanhold when snow and storms closed the passes through the Laringorn Alps. We arrived just in time for the Winter Solstice Festival and the Clanhold was full to overflowing with celebrants not only from our own glen, but from all the neighbouring glens. Cullin and I were no s
ooner welcomed properly than Medroch drew me aside and informed me gravely that it was high time I was married, then announced that he had arranged for me to wed Nennia dan Caennedd, daughter of the laird of Glen Afton. Before I had time to do more than sputter my confusion, he had us handfasted and the deed was done.
Nennia was a shy little girl, about my own age, mayhap a bit younger, slender and graceful as a young fawn with a glimmer of humour lurking always at the corners of her mouth. To my surprise, and to hers, too, I think, she delighted me, and I apparently pleased her. But we had so little time together. Cullin and I left shortly after Imbolc when the passes began to open again. As we were leaving, she informed me, a dimple forming at the corner of her mouth, that she believed she was with child. Before we could return to the Clanhold, a messenger from Medroch reached us. My delicate little wife was dead in early childbed, and I had a son.
“And the boy?” Cullin asked, for I could not speak.
“Healthy and strong,” the messenger replied. “Your lady wife has taken charge of him. They named him Keylan.”
Medroch’s grandfather had been called Keylan. I nodded. “A fitting name, I said hoarsely. “Aye, fitting.”
Nennia’s death saddened me greatly, but I could not grieve as deeply as I thought I should. We had scarcely begun getting to know each other before I left. Poor, shy little fawn of a girl. I would never forget her, and I greatly regretted my lack of overwhelming grief. But soon, life eased back into the now familiar pattern of ranging back and forth through the mountain passes between Laringras and Isgard. I was content in the rhythm of my life.
VII
The road, little more than a narrow track, wound through the towering cedars and firs at the base of the cliffs. It followed the course of the river through the spur of mountains thrusting north from Laringras to curve around the east border of Falinor and Isgard. Overhead, thick grey cloud obscured the tops of the peaks in every direction, and filled the chilly air with a fine, wet mist that was trying to make up its mind to become drizzle.
Southern mountains in early spring, I thought in disgust as I rode nearly a furlong ahead of the straggling merchant-train. I hate southern mountains in early spring. I hate drizzle and mist. I hate rain forests. And I especially hate mountains in early spring when they stood shoulder deep in drizzly mist and choked by rain forest. Too cursed many places for bandits to lie in ambush, waiting for an unwary merchant-train. Too much chance we might have to earn every silver the merchants paid us for the whole trip in the half-season it took just to get through these passes.
It was less than a sevenday to Vernal Equinox, the beginning of early spring. We had spent the season between Midwinter and Imbolc traversing the Ghadi Desert. The Ghadi is tricky, but it’s mostly dry and hot at this time of year, and the air doesn’t threaten to choke a man with fog and drizzle, or trickle cold into him to turn blood and bone to ice. A fortnight past Imbolc had seen us into the dry eastern slopes of the mountains. Now, we were over the Divide and into the wet rain forest of the western slopes, and coming to the last stage of the journey. With any luck, we would be in Honandun a few days after Equinox.
If we don’t drown first, I thought morosely. Hellas. I had forgotten how wet spring could be here.
It was my turn to ride front guard and I was feeling sorry for myself as I tried to huddle deeper into my plaid to keep the damp chill from seeping right down into my bones. “This is no place for man nor beast,” I complained bitterly to Rhuidh, who merely flicked his ears once, then ignored me.
A quick flash of movement among the giant cedars caught my eye. Just a glimpse of something the wrong shape No leaf shivering under the glancing blow of a drop of moisture, nor animal dodging behind a massive trunk.
Still hunched within my plaid, I scanned the area around us carefully. “You being the beast, and me being the man,” I said to Rhuidh, “you’d think together we’d have a lot more sense than this. Horse sense is a myth, sure as Hellas.” Again, the horse stolidly ignored the remark.
There. Another flash of movement. This time, I was certain it was a man-shape hiding in the trees. As unobtrusively as possible, I made sure the sword on my back was loose and ready. If I had spotted two bandits, that meant there had to be at least six or seven more I couldn’t see.
At least a dozen of them. Eight of us, not counting the merchants, of course, who were next to useless in a fight anyway. Not exactly fair odds. Cullin was probably worth half a dozen bandits all by himself, and I was almost his equal after nearly eight years of training. In those eight years, we had never lost so much as one pack animal to bandits in these passes. But I wasn’t about to let myself get complacent about it. There was always a first time, and carelessness was not good for business.
I slowed Rhuidh and glanced back over my shoulder like a man expecting his relief to come trotting up the track behind him. Sure enough, I saw Cullin approaching. Negligently, he lifted a hand to scratch his nose, his big hand hiding the anticipatory grin he wore. He had seen the bandits. I rubbed my ear to tell him I had seen them, too. He merely grinned again and motioned me back toward the main body of the merchant-train.
The bandits sprang their trap two furlongs farther along the track where the pass narrowed as the river plunged through a cataract between the high walls. Even as I spurred Rhuidh to meet the first rush of the attack, I saw I had guessed wrong. There were more than a dozen of them. Perhaps fifteen.
The merchants were already gathering the pack animals into a tight, easily defensible bunch as my raised sword clashed against the swinging blade of one of the bandits. I kneed Rhuidh sideways, and his shoulder slammed into the flank of the bandit’s horse, knocking him off balance. The bandit grabbed for his saddle horn, and I relieved him of his head, then whirled to meet the next bandit. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cullin wheel his stallion, his blade flashing about his head, to take on two bandits at once.
I ducked as the bandit, a man with the dark hair and eyes of a Maeduni, swung his sword. His lips drew back over his teeth in a snarl and he twisted in the saddle to avoid my counter-thrust, then ducked and slashed his sword at my belly. I barely got out of the way in time by hauling Rhuidh around and sliding sideways in the saddle. I turned back to the bandit to find his blade slicing toward my neck. I ducked and managed to get my sword up to parry his.
Then a strange thing happened. His eyes widened and his mouth fell open in shock. He yanked his horse back a step or two. I hesitated, surprised at his reaction, and saw he was staring at my sword. He muttered a word that sounded like “Celae,” and began to wheel his horse away from me. He didn’t get very far. An arrow from the bow of one of the archers caught him through the throat and he pitched forward into the mud of the track. I looked back to see Thom grinning and nocking another arrow on his bow.
The battle was over. When I looked around, I could see four or five bandits enthusiastically demonstrating how quickly their horses could take them away. Cullin stood near the huddled pack animals, wrapping a scarf around a wound on his left arm. He pulled the knot tight with his teeth as I dismounted beside him.
“Let me see it,” I said, reaching for his arm.
He pulled it away and shook his head. “Just a scratch,” he said. “It’ll heal well by itself. Are you all right?”
“Aye, not even scratched,” I said. I looked over my shoulder. There was no sign of the retreating bandits now. A few of them lay in the mud, groaning over their wounds. More lay still in death. We had given a good accounting of ourselves.
“They’ll not be bothering us again, I think,” Cullin said. “We’ll have earned our bonus again this trip.”
“Aye,” I agreed. “And tomorrow, we’ll be out of these accursed mountains.”
“Not like Tyra, is it?” he asked.
I laughed, thinking of the heather clad hills and mountains around the Clanhold of Broche Rhuidh, the Red Tower. “No verra much,” I said. In this season, the glens would be touched with soft green and the
water of the lochs would ripple quietly under the gentle blue of the sky. “Not much like Tyra at all.”
Cullin laughed and turned away to gather in the guards and take stock. We had taken a few minor wounds, but had lost none of the men. We had not been so lucky the last time we were in these mountains. One of our men had taken a spear through the lungs, and even as I tried to heal him, I felt the dark, spreading numbness of a mortal wound in him. The force of his life-flow ebbed under my hands and evaporated like water on hot stones. Helplessly, I watched him slip away, unable to do anything for him but ease his pain as he died. It wasn’t something I wanted to experience again.
Within half an hour, we had the merchant-train moving again.
We were out of the mountains the next day into the gently rolling hills of Isgard. Six days later, we descended onto the wide coastal plain only a league or two from the outskirts of Honandun. We encountered no more trouble.
The merchants were quick to pay Cullin’s fee and were generous with the bonuses. Cullin paid the men. Most of them had wives or sweethearts in the city, and scattered with their full purses. Left to ourselves, Cullin and I set off to find a tavern.
***
The Isgardian soldier came at me, sword clutched in both hands, teeth bared in a snarl, and murder in his eye. To begin with, the man was drunk. But off duty Isgardian troopers, like many other soldiers, often were. Still, he should have known better than to jibe a Tyran clansman about his kilts, and he certainly should have known better than to draw a dagger. Cullin took exception to the insult, and exploded into outraged indignation in the face of the weapon.
