The Shattered Vine

by Laura Anne Gilman

  There was surprise, but little shock, as though Ximen had somehow known this moment was inevitable.

  Three times now he had refused the vine-mage sacrifices. Every man was needed, he had told the mage. Every body that could hold the walls, or sail a ship, was needed. The mage would have to look to his own slaves, until the quarter’s Harvest was due. He would give no more of his people to feed the vine-mage’s hunger.

  And yet the vine-mage could not cease, taking what was not his, not by tradition nor need. Like a wall-beast, he answered only to his own hunger. And, like a wall-beast, he needed to be stopped.

  “Where is he?”

  “The road returning to his yards,” Erneo said, his breath calming now that his lord had been informed of the situation. “He took eleven, between the ages of nine and eleven. Seven boys, four girl-children. All from different families.”

  Slaves were taken before the age of three, and the families were proud to see them go, proud to have the magic found in their family, even if the child did not grow to be chosen. There was protocol, tradition, as there was around all things magic. They might be far from Sin Washer’s gaze, but there were things that were not done, nonetheless. . . .

  And he, Ximen, had allowed them to be done. He had thought he’d come to an accommodation with his own actions, accepting them as necessary, needful.

  No more. The mage might not have been mad enough to take any of Ximen’s children, but they were all his children. And he would put an end to this, now.

  “In my quarters, there is a blackwood box.” It was not hidden nor locked, the better to ensure that no inquisitive noses sniffed it out. “Fetch it, and bring it to me in the stables. Hurry.”

  By the time Ximen had a horse saddled—refusing any accompaniment, much to the distress of the House’s stablemaster, a square-shouldered, hawk-nosed man who seemed more worried about his horse than his Praepositus—Erneo appeared with the box.

  “Good man. Keep them working, don’t let anyone worry. I’ll deal with this and be back before dawn.”

  “Ximen . . .” Erneo had run with him as a boy, in the endless mixing and alliance-forming the Grounding families did. “Be careful.”

  That last request—not an order, Erneo would never dare order his Praepositus—echoed in Ximen’s ears as he caught sight of the dust trail the vine-mage’s caravan left behind. It was a heavyset wagon that might have been used to carry casks or farming equipment, save for the metal loops set into the side of the wagon itself.

  “Tradition,” Ximen had been told, when he asked why the children were chained into the cart. “Tradition.”

  There was nothing of tradition about the chains binding the eleven in the cart today. As Ximen drew nearer, he could see several of them still tugging at the chains, while the others sat glumly, slumped against the sideboard, resigned to whatever fate would bring them. None of them were crying, and Ximen felt an insane flash of pride: even the children of the Grounding knew that tears solved nothing.

  “Mage!”

  His shout carried up the road, and the two slaves walking alongside the wagon certainly heard him, but the vine-mage neither looked nor stopped.

  “Mage, cease!”

  That time, with Ximen’s horse almost even with the wagon, the vine-mage pulled down on the reins and the thick-set pony pulling the wagon obediently came to a halt.

  The vine-mage turned in his seat and pushed back his hood, so that he was fully visible in the warm afternoon sun. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his narrow, close-cropped head, and his eyes were cold and dead. “Yes?”

  “It ends here, mage.” Ximen wished the man had a name. He did not want to give him the respect of a title, did not want to emphasize the differences, but bring him back under the laws that all of the Grounding lived under. Remind him that magic did not excuse him from obligations—did not excuse him from the need for human compassion.

  Except, of course, that it did. It always had.

  “Is there a problem, Ximen?”

  The whoreson smiled at him. Smiled, as though they were meeting over vina and roasted hill-deer; wives at their side and children playing behind them, rather than chained to a sweat-stained wooden cart. Ximen swallowed, feeling bile rise up, trying to choke him.

  “This ends. This ends now.”

  “So close to your goal, my dear friend? Oh, no.” The vine-mage tutted at him, a father to his impatient son. “You have sown and pruned . . . will you not Harvest, as well?”

  The bile flooded his mouth, and he clenched his jaw against the need to spit. “No more. Not children.”

  The vine-mage pursed his lips, as though he, too, were tasting something sour. “You would not give me what I needed, Ximen. You knew, oh, yes, you knew what I needed, and you would not give it to me. And so I have taken. But not the ones you needed, not the ones you warned me off. No warriors, no householders, no mothers who might yet bring new life to your little lands. I understand, yes, I do. I take only those which cannot serve our plans any other way. Will you deny them the chance to serve?”

  Ximen forced down the bile, tried to put a placating, understanding tone into his voice. “I asked too much of you.” He had asked nothing but what the other man offered, the crumbs of his own ambition. “The strain of so much magic has taken its toll; you are stretched too thin, too far from your soil. It is healthy rain and sun that we need, not—”

  He choked, unable to say it.

  The vine-mage’s eyes brightened. “Not what? Not blood? Sin Washer gave his god’s blood to break us, to shatter us to less, but our blood rebuilds, makes it stronger. Are we not like gods? Are we not more than gods, that we create where they only destroyed?” A speck of froth appeared at the corner of the mage’s mouth, tinged with red as though he had bitten the inside of his mouth in his excitement.

  “We are not gods,” Ximen said, not daring to look at the slaves, or the children staying still as frightened monkeys. “There are things we must not do.”

  “There is nothing I must either do or not do,” the vine-mage said. Ximen’s gaze went instinctively to the man’s hands, to make sure that he was not reaching for a wine sack, even as his own hand went for his blade.

  “Blood flows,” the vine-mage crooned, his mouth barely moving. “Blood chokes.”

  A decantation—but the whoreson had not sipped . . . had he been keeping the spellwine in his mouth, had he been waiting, all this time? Even as panic reached his thoughts, Ximen felt something change within him, the sensation of something crawling inside his body, like spiders inside his skin, and shuddered, his hand falling away from the sword even as his vision started to dim. He could not feel his face, and something heavy pushed against his chest.

  “Go,” the vine-mage said, almost lovingly.

  Ximen convulsed once, and quiet-magic flooded him, turning his blood to sludge, slowing his heart and lungs until he was merely flesh, mounted on a suddenly nervous horse.

  One of the slaves caught the reins up before the horse could bolt, and patted its neck, wordlessly calming it down.

  “That was easier than I expected,” the vine-mage said, neither pleased nor surprised, but merely noting a fact. A pity he had to rush things, it would have been easier if he’d waited. But you harvest when the grapes are ripe.

  “Bring the body,” he told the slave, already lifting the reins to start the wagon moving again.

  The slave showed no emotion, slinging the body over the front of his horse, then bringing the reins over the horse’s head and leading it slowly as they picked their way down the road. In the back of the wagon, the sound of muffled tears slowly faded, until there was only silence.

  PART III

  Regent

  Chapter 12

  THE ATAKUAN SEA

  Early Spring

  Captain! Red flag on the horizon!”

  Aron lifted his spyglass to where the bird’s-eye, hanging from rigging like a madman, was pointing. The lad had spotted it first, but it was vi
sible to all against the clear sky. Distant on the horizon, a red stripe fluttered, then another, dark smudges underneath them the forms of ships. His eyes were old, though, even with the glass, and he could make no more detail than that.

  After so many months on the water with only the occasional pirate or Eastern trader-ships to report, he had almost forgotten why they were here. The crew was accustomed to long stretches of boredom, but he was not. Aron had filled his hours making sketches of the seabirds and fish the sailors caught, and noting the display of stars, all useful and valid expressions of his supposed existence, that of a man of inquiry with a wealthy—and lenient—patron. But now, in a rush, his true purpose and identity returned.

  “Two ships?” Two ships, out here, at the edges of the Lands Vin, bearing the red banner . . . not that anyone would tell Washers where they might or might not go, but the Brotherhood did little, if anything, without deep reason, and any parlance they might have in these waters was certainly within the course of what he had been set here to observe.

  “Mil’ar? What do you see?”

  The cabin boy’s voice had barely broken, and he looked very young, staring up at Aron, old enough to be his twice-grandsire.

  “Trouble, lad,” he said. “I see trouble.”

  The boy’s face lit up as though the spy had told him of some great treasure, and he dashed off to climb a little ways up the rigging, to see if he, too, could see what was coming.

  “A true son of Caul,” one of the sailors said, laughing, even as they heeded the Captain’s orders to turn the ship about and match direction with their visitors.

  His master needed to hear of this. Without taking his eyes off the horizon, Aron reached down to the folding table in front of him, unerringly finding the small metal pot waiting there, as it had waited every single day since they had set sail, tucked under his pillow for safety, while he slept. It had no sigil on it, no wax stopper or indication that it held anything at all of value, and yet it was worth more than the entire ship and crew combined. The taste burned as it went down his throat, but Aron had been trained to control the automatic grimace that accompanied the uishkiba poitín.

  He did not like it, did not like any stench of magic—a true son of Caul he was, too—but he would use it, as ordered.

  Deep in the hold, the three women came to awareness, their months-long sleep broken by the summons of the poitín. Like the claws of birds, their mind gripped his, and knew all that he knew, saw all that he saw.

  He heard them whispering in his brain, shuffling about in their sealed box of a cabin, draped in the black cloth that earned them the nickname of corvines, the black-winged birds of battlefields. Witches. Abominations, twisted and changed by exposure to the poitín. But whatever battle it was Caul now fought, it required new weapons, and the corvines were part of it.

  “Washers sighted. Two ships.” A quiver of excitement that was both his and theirs fluttered through the link, to suddenly, unexpectedly, be useful. Finally.

  “Hold, Captain, they’re coming about—Captain!” The bird’s-eye’s voice rose from his usual shout to something showing true excitement and . . . fear? Aron paused, still feeling the tingling burn of the brew in his throat, and waited for news, aware of the three birds waiting with him.

  “Captain, I don’t know those flags!”

  “Sound the colors,” the Captain called back.

  “Red on gold, sir!”

  Iajan colors. Iajan ships out here would not be terribly unusual—the whoreson explorers were Caul’s match on the oceans, although they had managed to stay out of each others’ way, for the most part. But two, together, here, might mean trouble. . . .

  “And black!”

  Aron snatched up the spyglass again, trying to see what the eye was maddening on about. There were no colors that ran red and black and gold . . .

  Except there they were, snapping sharply, clear now as the ships came closer. Old-fashioned ships, the sort Aron had not seen since childhood, bearing a flag he did not know. Suddenly, the foul taste of obscene magic caught in his throat was matched by the taste of bile rising from his stomach.

  Aron had been a scholar before he was a spy. He knew that flag.

  “Tell our master,” he said even as the pot-magic began to fade, unsure if the witches were still sending. “Tell him the Exiled have returned.”

  Chapter 13

  Spring

  The village, just south of the border-range of Corguruth in the hills of The Berengia, had built the icehouse in the time of Lord Ranulf’s grandfather, bringing each stone from the riverbed and placing it just so into the hillside, building walls twice a man’s height and filling the chinks in so that even during the warmest months, the air stayed cool within.

  Normally great blocks of ice rested on a bed of wood chips a handspan thick, and slabs of dried meats and wreaths of vegetables hung from the rafters year-round. A wealthy House might use spellwines to keep their food fresh, but despite their relative prosperity, such a thing was beyond the village of Foulantane. An icehouse was good enough for their grandsires, and it had been good enough for them . . . until the lord closed the mountain passes, the last of their ice melted, and the blight ruined the winter crop they had expected would sustain them.

  They had survived the winter, but spring had not brought with it the expected relief: they had eaten all their seed and had nothing now to plant, too few lambs born to butcher, and still expect the flock to grow and thrive.

  The elders appealed to the town one over, a day’s travel down the Great Road, and were told that they had no grain to spare: the blight was there, as well, the early crops stunted and frail, and their children needed to be fed, first.

  A delegation was formed; the reeve and one elder from each village went to Lord Ranulf, seeking news of what relief they might be afforded in the meantime. It was a lord’s right to close roads and mount guards as he deemed needful, but it was his obligation to care for those affected as well. Or so the elders had said when they set out on their mules, their mood determined but confident.

  They returned, shaken and empty-handed. The lord had been too busy to see them, riding the borders with his troops. Well and good; the lord was a busy man and it was well that he knew what was happening on the outskirts. But the man he left in charge had refused to see the delegation, making them wait all day before sending them home.

  “It’s a hard time, he said.” The reeve had repeated that phrase half a dozen times since their return, and it made no more sense than it had the first time he’d said it. “Hard time, and we all must wait and be patient. Patient is easy for him to say, in his House with his servants and his spells. What about us?”

  Disaster in one town was a problem. In two, trouble. But when it happened in three, it would doubtless be happening in more, and there would be no help from others—and more worryingly, from their sworn lord.

  “Vineart Hugues?” one of the men suggested.

  “Phagh. He has already packed up his House and gone to cover within the lord’s House, like a tame dog. His slaves tend his yards; you would suggest we take food from their plates?”

  The speaker had been about to suggest just that, but a look at the expressions of the men around him kept him from voicing such a thing. Slaves were lower than any freeman, but to be pitied, not preyed upon.

  Not yet, anyway. The seven men in the room knew that, if conditions changed, they would protect their families first.

  “Sharpen your scythes and be ready,” the reeve said, finally, his voice thick with regret. “If we will not be given aid, then we have no choice but to take it.”

  THE HOUSE OF MALECH THE BERENGIA

  “VINEART!”

  The shout was loud, well-modulated, and bordering on insolent. Jerzy had encountered Prince Ranulf only once before; he had been sent with spellwine to heal the villagers struck ill by the afterstink of the sea serpent’s flesh. He had been intended as a messenger, his master’s foot, to run errands. Instead, he
had helped Ranulf hold off the attack of another serpent, using spellwine to support and modify Ranulf’s decantation.

  Jerzy had told no one what he had done, allowing Ranulf to take the credit for the destruction of the serpent, but he had suspected even then that the prince knew that his decantation alone could not have been enough.

  From the look in the lord’s eye, now, Jerzy suspected that suspicion had grown into something more pronounced. And more problematic, for Jerzy. He would not antagonize the man, not yet. But neither would he be conciliatory. Not when the man rode onto his lands, accompanied by armed guards, and shouted for him in that voice.

  The winter had been no kinder to Ranulf than the others; his face was still clean-shaven but the skin sagged around the jowls and under his eyes. But he still sat his horse with an easy grace, his shoulders proud and his elbows relaxed. The two solitaires in their distinctive brown leathers, hounds trotting alongside, were the only guard he had brought, and Jerzy inclined his head once in acknowledgment, even as he stepped down the path and under the ever-green archway to greet his visitor.

  Kaïnam had given the party a careful once-over before allowing Jerzy to leave the House. In a way, bringing solitaires rather than his own fighters was a sign of Ranulf’s respect—for Malech, if not Jerzy. Bringing warriors could have been construed as a threat, showing his force, or it might have implied that Ranulf did not trust the Vineart, to come alone. Either was an insult to his host. Solitaires were perhaps more deadly, but they were more expensive to hire, and would not be thrown into battle lightly; therefore, they could be seen as merely a courtesy, escorts to a prince who could not be expected to travel alone. Ranulf came to talk, not fight. For now, anyway.