Whiskeyjack

by Victoria Goddard

  Whiskeyjack

  Greenwing & Dart, Volume 3

  Victoria Goddard

  Published by Underhill Books, 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  WHISKEYJACK

  First edition. January 19, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Victoria Goddard.

  ISBN: 978-1988908120

  Written by Victoria Goddard.

  Also by Victoria Goddard

  Greenwing & Dart

  Stargazy Pie

  Bee Sting Cake

  Whiskeyjack

  The Sisters Avramapul

  The Bride of the Blue Wind

  The Warrior of the Third Veil

  Watch for more at Victoria Goddard’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: An Under-appreciated Genre

  Chapter Two: Gaolbreak

  Chapter Three: The Trogdolyte Kingdom

  Chapter Four: The Hunter in the Green

  Chapter Five: The True and Neglected Art of Poacher

  Chapter Six: Cutting Counter

  Chapter Seven: The Hanging Hill

  Chapter Eight: Refuge

  Chapter Nine: First Draw

  Chapter Ten: Correspondences

  Chapter Eleven: The Third Letter

  Chapter Twelve: Murder?

  Chapter Thirteen: The Embroidery Circle

  Chapter Fourteen: Fairy Blood

  Chapter Fifteen: The Gift

  Chapter Sixteen: Dinner Plans

  Chapter Seventeen: Hollow Ways

  Chapter Eighteen: The Burglars

  Chapter Nineteen: Factors

  Chapter Twenty: Introductions

  Chapter Twenty-One: Face Cards

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Research Questions

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Anatomy of a Dragon

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Two Sticks and a Stone

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Importance of Being Earnest

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Anatomy of a Curse

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Literary Criticism

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Bull, Boar, Stag

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Crimson Lake

  Chapter Thirty: Ebraöni

  Chapter Thirty-One: Jack-in-the-Box

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Complications

  Chapter Thirty-Three: The Magarran Strid

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Turning of the Waters

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Cut Across

  Chapter Thirty-Six: The Emperor Card

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Last Will and Testament of Benneret Buchance

  About the Author

  Chapter One: An Under-appreciated Genre

  I wrote my final paper at Morrowlea on the masterwork of Ariadne nev Lingarel, one of the last of the classical poets and, in my opinion, a much under-appreciated writer. Her poem, On Being Incarcerated in Orio Prison, is commonly reckoned one of the finest extant examples of a Third Vertical Calligraphic long-form ode, but since that particular genre was promoted only by a small group of closely-connected poets writing what could be deeply solipsistic allusions, that’s not saying much.

  In a fit of insight that for various reasons I did not actually end up defending before my tutor and the assembled faculty, I argued that Ariadne nev Lingarel was not only playing ‘the game of two sticks and a stone’, as this particular group of poets called their art, but also was a puzzle providing a key to the architecture of the prison in which she found herself. She had been condemned to life in Orio Prison after an exceedingly unpopular stint as Governor of the then-very-new Imperial Province of Northwestern Oriole, and had devoted the rest of her life to her masterwork.

  I examined my own cell carefully. It did not inspire me to poetry.

  Mind you, Yellton Gaol was built in a sturdy vernacular style with no pretensions to architectural merit or grandeur, and I had not been in there long. And unlike the fair Ariadne (I took leave to imagine her as beautiful; the one picture I had been able to find of her in Morrowlea’s library was an etching of her death-mask at the age of eighty-two, at which point she looked remarkably magisterial for someone who had been incarcerated for thirty-nine years), I had no clear idea why I was in gaol nor how long I could expect to remain there.

  My cell was roughly wedge-shaped, with the door at the narrow end. The long walls were eleven paces long; the wide end eight and a half; and try as I might, I could conceive of no system even remotely pertinent to the barony of Yellem in South Fiellan whereby those numbers were significant.

  I paced them out several times until I had the numbers secure in my mind.

  The walls were made of the rough yellow sandstone common to Yellem—nothing like the shelly limestone or gold-glittering-granite of the fair Ariadne’s cell—and various previous incumbents had scratched rude graffiti on them. A sump drain in the corner away from the door provided a dank air and an unhygienic chamber-pot; a small window above the drain was thickly barred, looked out onto the main square, and was moreover far too small for me to get more than my fist through.

  A few stray lines of On Being Incarcerated emerged out of the loud chaos of thoughts in my mind, to do with the colours of the flowers Ariadne could see on the sea-cliffs and the sight of distant storm clouds out over the ocean.

  I glanced at my cell again, to see if anything had changed. Nothing had. I sighed and used my foot to nudge at the only furnishing, a mildewy straw pallet. I did not want to sit on it. My friend Hal, who was teaching me the rudiments of magic, had so far taught me a handful of theories and incantations, of which keeping insects at bay was one. I had not tried it on anything more numerous than three houseflies; I feared the pallet’s fauna would outmatch my skill.

  I prodded the pallet again, for want of anything better to do. My foot hit something hard. I crouched down to investigate, wishing for a stick with which to poke the straw, but I had not accoutred myself for anything beyond a long-distance run that morning and therefore had nothing so useful as a swordstick. I had not brought a hat, or gloves, or even a wallet of money, which the gaol-warden had appeared most disappointed by.

  I’m not much of a gentleman sometimes, I’m afraid.

  Finally, with a faint thrill—for if not taboo, magic was certainly desperately unfashionable—I murmured the words of the insect-away spell. Eako ekaino ekalo. The Old Shaian meaning echoed in my mind, snagging on a line of On Being Incarcerated, where the poet played on all the various meanings of ‘ward’.

  I was disappointed to find only a rock.

  AFTER A WHILE, WHICH felt like hours but was very likely much shorter, I fell to studying the door.

  I had, of course, investigated it when I first arrived in the cell. I had duly noticed its heavy oaken planks, its great iron bands, the massive unyielding grandeur of its hinge assembly, the hinge-pins as wide as my thumb. I fiddled with my ring, which was a habit I was trying to stop, and turned the energy to playing with the rock instead. It was a granite cobble or sett, about two pounds in weight, and of a pleasant light grey flecked with dark grey and little shiny bits of mica.

  That about exhausted my knowledge of stones. The cobble was a bit too heavy to hold pleasantly in one hand, but its curved edges made it rock pleasantly on the floor. I rocked it back and forth with my foot and stared at the door and wondered which of my life’s choices had ended up with me here, and had just about decided on blaming Mr. Dart’s ducks when the door opened and two other men were thrust in.

  I was glad I was standing. I would have felt at an even greater disadvantage had I dared sit on the noisome pallet.

  My two fellow prisoners appeared experienced at the ways of gaol. Unlike myself, they made no protests; they made no futile gestures of defiance or anger; they did
not even appear to need distraction from their plight by excessive analysis of antique Shaian poetry. They simply walked in, ignored the door clanging shut behind them, exchanged one sharp glance with each other, and focused in on me.

  “Er, how do you do,” I said, bowing with what elaboration I could manage given the space and the absence of my hat.

  They stared at me some more.

  The one to my right was barely taller than me, and looked like some wicked version of Hal’s distant future: wizened, wiry, and canny were the adjectives that came to mind, along with a certain inevitable curiosity as to which high-ranking family he was black sheep or backside relation of, for apart from situation, clothing, and scar tissue he was clearly of noble Shaian family. He was also somewhere north of seventy, possibly eighty, so there was no telling where in all the old Empire he originated.

  I had the worrisome sensation, as he grinned at me, that he had probably killed more people than I knew personally.

  “G’day to you,” he replied, still grinning, with an accent I could not even begin to place. He scratched his side through a ragged tunic of equally indeterminate origin and age. It was a strange greyish-orange colour that almost worked against his dark skin. He put his shoulders against the wall, which impressed me even more by his total disdain for anything so missish as squeamishness.

  I turned to the other man. He was younger than his partner in (I presumed) crime, though easily old enough to be my father; I guessed maybe in his fifties, but his rough beard and almost theatrically villainous eyepatch made it hard to tell. He was a bit taller than I, rather stockier, and appeared—from what I could see of his figure through the layers of tattered garments he wore—to be made entirely of sinew and bone.

  Unlike the older man, he did not give the impression of a naturally lean and wiry figure. He looked as if a very long and hard road had carved away every inessential from his being. It was a fanciful thought but once I had it I could not keep from thinking it. I could not but think that more than his eye was missing.

  When he spoke his voice was unexpectedly deep and hoarse. His accent was roughly local—like his dark brown hair and mid-pale skin, it could have been from any of the four duchies and most of the rest of Northwest Oriole.

  “Jack,” he said, jabbing a thumb at himself. “He’s Ben.”

  I covered my hesitation by bowing again. Then: “Jim.”

  It was the first time I could remember ever deliberately misleading someone about my given name. It was faintly thrilling, much like my small act of magic. Unlike with that, I also felt a small pang of disappointment in myself.

  I could name five Jacks and seven Bens in Ragnor Bella alone. My given name, on the other hand, was so unusual that I knew of only one other person named it. Anyone asking for a young man named Jemis would immediately be directed to me—all the more so because of some small notoriety I had earned my first month home from university.

  Not that it was my fault the local magistrate’s wife and sister-in-law were deep in the thrall of a criminal organization growing pernicious drugs on his estate.

  Nor that someone had started a cult to the Dark Kings and was sacrificing cows at the Ellery Stone.

  Nor even that a dragon had demolished the cake competition at the Dartington Harvest Fair.

  I sighed. I was Jemis Greenwing, Mad Jack Greenwing’s son, the Viscount St-Noire (a long story), Fiellanese scholar at Morrowlea, and current incarcerated felon. Two questions would be sufficient for anyone to find me.

  Jack and Ben nodded and performed much the same inspection of the cell as I had earlier. It did not appear to move either of them to poetry, either. After Jack had lifted himself up to look through the window (with a casual display of strength I admired silently from my corner next to the drain), they exchanged another glance, then each squatted down against the wall in silent reflection.

  I wondered how long they had known each other to develop such intense skills at non-verbal communication and what exactly they did to require it. I sat down gingerly on the pallet to ponder, though to be honest I was almost immediately of the opinion that they were highwayman on their way to or from the Arguty Forest.

  THE ONLY OTHER GAOL I had ever been inside was the tiny one in Ragnor Bella. My father had taken me there, the summer I was nine, with what I could only assume was the intention of dissuading me from taking up either crime or law enforcement.

  At the time I had been resolute in my desire to follow my father to glory in the Astandalan Army. It would have been difficult to follow on his heels, recipient as he was of the Heart of Glory from the hands of the Emperor himself. Only the Fall of Astandalas dissuaded me from this plan, and I still sometimes felt vaguely cheated that I could not buy my colours (or even enlist as a regular) and see what I could make of myself.

  Inveragory for law, my current plan, was not all that appealing. Nonetheless, I could not expect to work for Mrs. Etaris at Elderflower Books forever, though. One day I might want a family—and rather sooner than that I wanted to do my duty for the Woods Noirell—and most urgently of all I wanted to clear my father’s name and reclaim his—now my—inheritance.

  The granite cobble was a hard lump just a little too far under my thigh to ignore. I shifted position awkwardly, aware of how both Jack and Ben—though the latter was feigning sleep—were immediately alert at my motion. I glanced aimlessly and, I hoped, unthreateningly around, and discovered the deeper significance of something I had seen but not comprehended earlier, which was that the hinges of the cell door were on the inside.

  Chapter Two: Gaolbreak

  It took all three of us a considerable amount of effort to lift the door off its hinges. The granite cobble served its purposes—first to loosen the hinge-pins, and secondly to act as brace and pivot once we had lifted the door.

  “Could do with some oil,” I said breathlessly as we manoeuvred it against the wall.

  The two men had entered just before dark, which was half past four this time of the year, and thanks to the short November days it was not yet six by the time we made our escape. Based entirely on my limited knowledge of the habits Mr. Etaris (the Chief Constable of Ragnor Bella and the husband of my employer), I surmised that the Yellton gaol-warden would be dining at the bourgeois countryman’s hour, which was a good hour earlier than that favoured by the gentry. I also reasoned, with more certainty, that six of the clock made unexpected noises and people alike less alarming than they would be later in the evening.

  All that was sound as far as it went.

  Unfortunately this was only as far as the back door of the gaol, where we—all right, I—tripped right over the constable on guard and sent his dinner flying.

  We split immediately. Ben and Jack forked right while I launched into an all-out sprint down the main street of Yellton.

  This was not perhaps the wisest action I could have taken.

  I am, however, a fine runner, odd though it might be to describe myself that way. After a few weeks of being embarrassed to be caught running for pleasure and exercise, I had entered my name in the three-mile race at the Dartington Harvest Fair, to the wonder and wagering of the barony. Due to an unexpected encounter with highwaymen hired to delay (or possibly to kill) me, I had come second, but the main benefit of the whole affair was that I had openly proclaimed myself a partaker of the sport, and added another layer to the reputation for eccentricity I was fast developing.

  My friend Mr. Dart said that I was already sufficiently eccentric for a man three times my age. He also pointed out that it seemed hard to have to wait until one was sixty to have fun. I myself did not actually endeavour to be eccentric. Running was the only way I could make sense of my life. I had started having strange dreams and occasional nightmares since the dragon-slaying and curse-breaking and so forth, and running the barony in the morning was a major help in anchoring me to the present day and situation.

  After a fortnight I had traversed almost all the roads of Ragnor barony and also developed a few f
avourite routes. I supposed I should have borne in mind that if my running was no longer a secret, well, neither was my route, and incredible as it seemed, there were several people who seemed dead-set on being my enemies.

  One of them had, presumably, arranged for today’s excursion.

  There were a lot of people out on Yellton’s main street. They did not appear to know what to make of me or of the cries being raised behind me, but it was surely only a matter of time before someone put two and two together and came up with ‘gaolbreak’.

  Sudden turns were not a large enough proportion of my training, I discovered as I grabbed a defunct lamp-post, swung around it, and endeavoured to launch down the alley behind it without pitching over onto my face.

  In these post-Astandalan days, with magic erratic and out of fashion, only the houses of wealth or pleasure had torches illuminating their forecourts. Most towns still had the lamp-posts up, perhaps in the hopes that magic would return to both fashion and use, but they were now symbols mostly of the fall of Empire and the collapse of rational civilization &cetera. Contemporary poets probably made great use of them, or would if any of them were interested in the complex interactions of sign and significance and sense that had once been all the rage.

  The alley was dark as a close November night. Initially this seemed a good point; the downsides I discovered when my foot landed on something soft and moist and I went flying.

  “This way, lad,” came a rough voice out of the shadows. Rough hands grabbed my arm to haul me upright. I gasped, winded from the fall, and could not help but follow Jack as he led me into a shadowed recess that led, it appeared, into an inner court.

  Ben was sitting on a stack of wood. He shook his head at me. “You’ve something to learn about the fine art of escape, lad.”

  “Lack of practice,” I replied, annoyed that my voice was shaky.

  “A spectacular fall,” said Jack. “Now hush.”

  I hushed.

  Feet and incoherent voices went by on the other side of the gate. After no longer than a held breath they tromped back again, the voices and even the steps sounding this time frustrated. I sat on the wood next to Ben, cold and smelling ruefully of dog shit, and wondered again just how I had gone from out on a run in the middle of Ragnor barony to being incarcerated in Yellton gaol.