by Janny Wurts
Early Winter 5922
Departures
While the Prime Matriarch pursues her intent to thwart Elaira’s journey to seek Biedar counsel, her urgent design to trap the enchantress takes pause for fresh news from the lane watch in Tysan: that a sharp quittance by Asandir has left Dakar stranded as a free agent…
Alarmed by the uncanny failure to collar the elusive pair of condemned fugitives, the True Sect High Priest at Erdane suspends his enforced curfew, then issues a command to assemble a formal delegation to Etarra, entrusted to bear a renewed petition pleading for the reform of the Light’s renegade avatar…
On the morning that suspended road travel resumes, an apparently surly, underfed groom weaves a hand-cart piled with horse trappings through a jammed inn-yard; but as a merchant’s wagon filled with cured fleeces rolls out down the Cainford road, the dumped saddle-cloths are found in a heap, with the fellow responsible vanished, and no other to blame for one stable blanket gone missing…
Early Winter 5922
IV. Dispossessed
The driver of the cart-load of fleeces proved to be a man in love with his wine-skin. Between rapturous guzzling, he sang off-key, or mumbled obscenities in tones of encouragement to the back-turned ears of his draught mules. Stopped by the Light’s lancers for questioning, he told raucous jokes. Oblivious to rolled eyes and glares of annoyance, he folded double and whooped himself breathless with laughter at his own cleverness.
The exasperated sergeant propped him back upright with distaste. Since nothing witnessed by a drunken sot could be counted reliable, the dedicates slapped the rumps of his team and sent him on his merry way. Better that, than risk being saddled with him when he flopped into a stupor and snored off his binge amid his rancid cargo. The minion of Darkness sought by the temple examiners moved over the land without tracks. Such a fell power would not need to skulk, far less stow away where the pungency of shearling wool left the hand that inspected it reeking of sheep.
Therefore, Tarens slept undisturbed, comfortably nestled amid the grease stink of lanolin. When the tipsy driver succumbed to his spree down the road, a small, black-haired man cloaked in a horse-blanket emerged from the fleeces, took over the mules’ reins, and steered the cart southward at a brisk pace.
Hours later, the driver awoke, moaning with a bilious hangover. Naught seemed the worse for his bout of unconsciousness, except that his strayed mules had meandered off course down a derelict side lane and snagged their bridles in the rank overgrowth. The wind was rising. Lowered sun filtered through the bare trees, and a pewter scud of cloud from the north threatened to bring a fresh snowfall. Grumbling over his tender head, the carter extricated his team, muscled his stalled wagon right way around, and back-tracked towards the main trade-road.
He never saw hide nor hair of the fugitives inadvertently given safe transport. An hour gone, the pair pressed forward on foot down the unused by-way. The weedy wheel-ruts devolved to a path, embroidered with dense thickets of burdock and flanked by a leafless coppice. The wood opened at length where the tumble-down ruin of a settlement bordered the river’s edge.
The rotted lathe-walls, broken fences, and moss-capped chimney stones had lain abandoned for years, roofless crofts and a caved-in forge overtaken by bitter-sweet vine. Likely the land’s bounty had gone to neglect when the resident families fell to a virulent outbreak of fever. Tarens allowed that Efflin’s case had been lucky. More often, those stricken succumbed and died. A village might be wiped out in a season, with the hale survivors too few to maintain the legacy left by misfortune.
The fallen beams stood open to sky. Nothing moved but the secretive pheasant, flushed squawking from the weedy straggle of stems left by kitchen gardens gone wild. Where there had been children and laughter and industry, only the rustles of drab little birds foraged amid the snarled briar.
Tarens ached, dispirited. ‘What are you looking for? We won’t find a haven, here.’
Head cocked to one side, his dark-haired friend continued to listen as if hope had not gone with the vanished inhabitants. Shortly, in the yard of a tumble-down cottage, he unearthed a dry root-cellar in decent repair. The nearby well had not fallen in. Though the rusted crank-shaft had frozen, the chain stayed intact enough to replace the rotted bucket with a discarded preserves jar. The drawn water stayed sweet. Plentiful hare grazed in the overgrown pastures. Summer-fat on the unmown hay, they were easily snared with a string noose. By nightfall, before the first snow blew in earnest, the vagabond’s foraging provided a tasty leek stew, stirred with a peeled stick in a dented pot.
The frugal cookfire he built amid a cracked hearth vented almost no smoke, a detail not lost upon Tarens, who crouched in the lee of the collapsed foundation, bruised and pained by every drawn breath. At each turn, his friend’s resourcefulness displayed a flagrant proficiency.
‘You’ve done this before,’ he broached at a hitched whisper.
The beggarman returned a luminous smile, unapologetic as he dished out two savoury servings into his scavenged jam crocks. Carmine-lit by the embers, he was raffish again, his dark hair in tangles and his sharp-cut features blurred over by several days’ stubble.
Tarens accepted his portion, moved to trepidation by the messy prospect of eating while strapped in the dressing that splinted his nose. A touch on his wrist dispelled that apprehension: he was offered a wooden spoon, crudely whittled. Not by the artifact blade from the diviner but with a plain harness knife, too likely filched from the inn’s cranky stableman.
‘Thank you,’ he rasped, grateful in spite of the suspect case of petty theft. ‘You must have a name?’
The question incited a glance, with raised eyebrows. The vagabond set down his meal. He retrieved the stick implement from the emptied pot and scraped three antique Paravian characters on the slate apron. A pause followed. After a frown of intense concentration, he surrendered his effort, left a gap, and inscribed a last cipher with an irritable flourish.
‘I can’t read the old runes,’ Tarens pressed gently.
The stick moved again, the inscription redone in the common characters used by town commerce. ‘ARI,’ the string began, followed by the same annoyed space, then the dangling character ‘N,’ finished off with a flick.
‘Arin will do, then,’ Tarens declared, tactful enough not to stir the frustration behind the peevish omission. ‘Unless you wish otherwise?’
An open-hand gesture gave resigned assent. Then hunger eclipsed the token exchange. Both men ate quickly. Before darkness fell, their coal-fire was doused, the swept ashes flung into the river. Arin smothered the blackened hearthstone under mouldered leaves, cleaned the jam-jars, and removed the one rigged to the well chain. Satisfied that no trace of their presence remained, he chased Tarens into the root-cellar. Huddled amid the chill influx of draughts and blind in the dank, cobwebbed darkness, the injured man wrapped up in the moth-eaten horse-blanket.
Nothing spoke but the outside whine of the wind, and the fitful scrape as dry leaves scratched across the overgrown entrance. Denied simple conversation, the crofter wondered what trauma incited his companion’s reluctance to talk.
The elusive answer remained unsolved since Arin slipped back outdoors in pursuit of unspecified business. Nocturnal by habit, he might stay abroad until after the storm broke. Tarens was left stranded with his own thoughts, wakeful and alone for the first time since the fraught peril of his deliverance.
Crops had failed here. The awareness tingled through skin, bone, and nerve, from the finger-tips pressed to cold earth with intent to detect the drummed vibration of hoof-beats. But no patrol of white lancers pursued his battered friend. Not yet; the certainty that such searchers would come cranked a relentless tension through his viscera. The man who failed to recall his true name, for convenience addressed as Arin, expelled a vexed breath and stood up.
He could not have explained how he sensed the imprinted presence of subtle disharmony. Only that, between the snow scent on the wind and the rustled
chatter of frosted grasses, a lingering blight threaded through the innate fabric of this remote patch of farmland. Like dissonance, some long-past event spun a kink in the natural currents that nourished the life in his surroundings.
He had no memory and yet, he knew. Once, long ago, he may have spun music to remedy such an imbalance. But not here: the pulse of this place did not rise in his blood though he could trace the stagnated eddies and define where ragged constrictions marred the rhythmic flow of its melody.
The upset was an entrenched affliction. Through the whine of the wind and the pressure of pending storm, he noted the absence of owls and the scarcity of the field-mice. The plentiful hare bespoke sparse herds of deer, which should have browsed on the unmown pastures in their drab winter coats. These fields were not, and never had been home to him. Still, if he let his attentive pause lengthen, the subtle symphony of deeper nuances gradually would be unveiled.
He shrank from the prospect. The stretch to access such uncanny awareness bristled him to instinctive recoil. Who knew what other dread fact might emerge? What firm assurance did he possess, that some ugly circumstance from his blank past might not resurface and shatter his equilibrium? Someone had chained him, once. He bore the scars. Trauma from an incorrigible imprisonment made him flinch, until the evidence haunted him: that somehow he might be a danger to others, and the cruelty of his past shackles might prove to be justified.
Fires never burned without smoke. The placid country-side was being swept to flush out a sorcerer maligned for foul practice. Frightened talk between the travellers on the thoroughfare had shared the same terrorized undertones overheard at the inn-yard. Worse, he had tended the hideous injuries inflicted upon Tarens by the brunt of hysterical consequence.
The inner dread had to be faced: his unknown past might hold criminal acts. If so, he deferred the crippling horror of digging for self-discovery. His gifted talent could not be denied. The evident power he carried, untapped, burned like molten flame under the skin. Scruple kept that frightful well-spring untested. He would not sound those depths. Never, until the kind-hearted crofter could be delivered to safety. That feat must be done on his upright human merits, if only to bear out an honest man’s faith in him.
Therefore, his finely tuned senses searched only for warning of inbound lancers. No such intrusion disrupted the night. Pending snow whetted the air to shaved ice, and stiffened gusts clattered the branches. He moved through the ruin softly as a wraith, while the promised storm stole in like snipped lace and paled the darkness with flurries. Content for the nonce to wear Arin’s identity, he combed through the graveyard ruin of the village for anything useful. He finished fast, stripped off his jacket, and wrapped up his picked stash of oddities. He returned to his chosen bolt-hole before the dusted ground showed his tracks.
The shelter enfolded him, pitch-black and silent, but not peaceful, as he expected. Instead his companion’s inconsolable grief pounded with breaking force against his unshuttered empathic awareness.
Arin dropped his wrapped cache. Reeled as though struck by a mortal blow, he could not move, could not breathe, could not think. Only feel, quite helpless to stem the flash-point shock of the other man’s raging emotion.
Entangled, Arin lost the wits to recoil. He had spent too many traumatic years pitched to the razor’s edge, his survival pressured to split-second response through the soul-naked handling of free wraiths. His ingrained, urgent reflex sorted the wrack, already driven to seek the needful pattern to uplift and heal…
Images of family burst through in a flood, stamped with the loss of unbearable parting: a thousand desolate imprints of love wrenched into abrupt separation. Some faces he recognized. Beside Efflin and Kerelie, he picked out the two deceased children whose spirits once spoke through a borrowed flute. The sad barrage also encompassed lost parents: a boy’s eyes watched a father leave home, conscripted to arms by a temple muster; this triggered a spinning, prescient rush into an unformed future, which showed Kerelie, convulsed with laughter while sewing a rich lady’s ruffled silk dress. Then that image faded into another, of Efflin bent over an open account book. Both scenes yet-to-be stretched like gauze across the torched biers that had consumed the wrapped casualties of summer’s fever. Amid the crackle of flames from past pyres, other layers of charred bones whispered through the endemic malignment that wracked the country-side to disharmony…
The paroxysm of visions flayed through as a rip tide that broke, ebbed, and stranded him. Arin came back to himself, his eyes streaming the tears of fierce heart-ache. He tasted the tang of death and despair, and ached for the bleak damage yet to occur. Once while caged in crystal, assuaging a wraith, he had translated such findings to music, then lifted the tissue of pain to a gentle requital through resonant melody. But Tarens was a being of flesh, prisoned inside the range of his cognizant senses. Lacking an instrument, speech only remained: and the stark terror of sounded words left the musician wretchedly paralyzed.
If he spoke, Arin dreaded the crushing discovery, that the singer perceived by his inner awareness might be just a wishful figment. To shatter a dream of such exquisite purity surely might wound his spirit deeply enough to destroy him. More than silence, he dreaded his flawed human voice might be found lacking in range and tonality.
Perhaps vicious uncertainty ripped a sound from him.
‘Are you all right?’ Tarens cried, from the dark. ‘Arin? Save us both! Are you injured?’
‘No.’ The word burst from his lips, half gasp, half whisper, a cork unleashed by a torrent. Arin’s concern could do nothing else. Only stem Tarens’s poisoned depression before sorrow blighted the man’s open heart and stunted his generosity.
‘Listen to me!’ Forced past reserve, the phrases burst free in a crisp, antique accent. ‘Your sister was never content as a crofter! She will serve out her year’s term at the temple, embroidering vestments and altar-cloths. Her fine needlework will bring her a skilled job at a quality dress shop. Your brother will never return to a farm. His loss of the boys cannot rest in that setting. He will find a new life as a clerk, enjoy songs with a circle of erudite friends, and marry a good woman for comfort.’
Tarens’s staggered amazement was palpable. ‘Arin! My friend, whoever you are, how can you claim to know this?’
The question floundered into tense quiet. The uneasy answer was not safe to broach since the truth implied seer’s gift. Such had happened before: prescient visions also had forecast the inquiry of the Light’s diviner. Which suggested a faculty that out-stripped intuition. Content to stay Arin, beyond fearful of Tarens’s righteous distrust if such talent branded him with the wickedness of proscribed sorcery, he retrieved his jacket and rifled through its bundled contents. The flint striker and bronze clip were too easily found: more damning evidence of a breadth of vision unimpaired in the dark. Frantic to salvage the man’s benign faith in him, Arin fashioned a rushlight.
He hoped that the wavering flame unveiled an innocuous presence: of a lean fellow with tousled black hair and green eyes, earnest with care and uncertainty. ‘Friend,’ Arin said gently, ‘by all that I am, whatever that is, I promise I won’t ever harm you.’
His assurance was not rough, or grating, or flat, but instead possessed a mellifluous lilt that all but unmanned him with gratitude. The elusive remembrance of a bard’s ability might not be a delusion, after all.
The rushlight steadied. Its honest exposure should reveal the terror that shadowed his unknown origins.
Tarens returned an unruffled regard from a hideously battered face. He saw no reason yet to shy from the fearful thorns of uncertainty. Crofter, he had been. But his fighter’s temperament sprang from a loyalty solid as bone. He said carefully, ‘We found you where the old lane leads to the ruin of the ancient earl’s court south of Kelsing. The Koriathain sometimes make use of that place for their private rituals. Have you an active connection to them?’
‘If I did,’ Arin answered, stung to leashed rage, ‘I was held as thei
r captive, most likely for an unclean purpose.’ He shuddered, hesitant to broach the nightmares that troubled his sleep. ‘By no means would I let them retake me.’ Shown Tarens’s appalled consternation, he added, ‘Your question is forthright! But if I don’t remember, I can’t guarantee you don’t walk in dangerous company.’
The awkward moment spun out to the hiss of the fluttered flame. How to account, that no recall existed? Or explain an experience that lurked outside reason, formlessly venomed by the latent horrors of a term of helpless entrapment?
While Arin struggled for tactful language, Tarens eased the tense pause with the innocence of human decency.
‘Since you don’t know what set you to flight, let’s not rush to press judgement. You may be the marked quarry, but I’ve been condemned. Survival has joined our fate.’ Before that recrimination could wound, Tarens added, ‘I regret nothing, do you understand? In your own way, you took risks for my family. All of your acts have done right by them.’
Last gesture, the crofter snuffed out the rush lamp. In patent reassurance, he settled and slept, deliberately vulnerable to the busy works of his mage-sighted companion. Surely he heard, as he nodded off, the purposeful strokes of edged steel being honed across a scrounged whetstone.
At due length, three broken kitchen knives were refurbished as daggers. Arin’s cut-leather belt wrapped the grips, with his oversized breeches retied at the waist with a braid made from scavenged string.
Stretched out to rest, tensioned yet by unease, Arin listened as the gusts winnowed the thickened snowfall outside. Musty air filled his nostrils. He could not shake off the haunted impression of another prior experience: that somewhere before, the hitched breaths of an injured friend had been sealed by a blizzard inside of a root-cellar. The cramped ambience spun him a gruesome dream, stark with the memory of desperate straits, and more vivid than uncontrolled prescience…
