Crecheling

by D. J. Butler

  “Put your things on the loft,” Narl invited them, “and let’s eat.”

  Jak and Eirig quickly scrambled into the crawlspace, depositing their shoulder bags and cloaks. When Dyan climbed up by herself, she found a low, broad space, its wooden floor covered with several deer skins. She laid her serape and beret in a corner, and set Aleena’s bundle on top of it.

  The bundle crinkled audibly again as she set it down.

  Not like cloth at all, nor like bread. It made a crinkling sound like paper.

  Dyan furrowed her eyebrows and looked at the bundle. Quickly, not wanting to linger so long she attracted attention, she unwrapped it.

  Inside were a beautiful loaf of warm brown bread and a folded sheet of paper. Dyan opened the paper and read the hand-written note on the inside.

  YOU ARE NOT SAFE HERE, it read in block letters. MY GOODMAN WILL TURN YOU IN TO THE OUTRIDERS. RUN AWAY, JAK. RUN AWAY AND DON’T EVER COME BACK.

  ***

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Holy Mother,” Dyan murmured. She tucked the scrap into the waist of her trousers and stared around at their gear. She needed a way out, but she didn’t see anything that looked useful. Maybe later they could slip away.

  In the meantime, just in case, she grabbed the bola and put it into the top of her boot. Under the leg of her trousers, it would be invisible. Then, afraid she had already been in the loft too long, she slid back down the ladder.

  “Do you have children?” Jak asked, as Dyan joined the others. He sat at the table with Eirig, a leather cup on the table in front of each of them.

  “Sit down!” Narl called to her. He sat closest to the door, with a jug on his lap.

  Aleena moved slowly around the table, setting bowls.

  “Have some applejack, unless you think that won’t sit well with your Basku stomach,” Narl said.

  Dyan didn’t want to mark herself as a Systemoid by asking what applejack was. “Thank you,” she said simply, and sat in the chair beside Jak.

  Narl poured applejack into the cup in front of her. The alcohol smell of it stung her nostrils. “Or not-Basku, as the case might be.”

  “I’m not Basku,” she said immediately, to fix her earlier contradiction with Jak. “I thought you were asking about my serape.” She took a sip of the applejack, swallowing it quickly and smiling, as if it weren’t bitter and didn’t burn her throat. “Thank you.”

  “I thought you looked awfully pale for a Basku girl,” Narl nodded. Dyan wanted to laugh—to her own eyes, after her long days under the desert sun, the backs of her hands were now nut-brown.

  “We don’t have children,” Aleen said.

  “Don’t need them for the sheep.” Narl took what looked like a long, deep pull from the jug. “Don’t like the idea of what they’d do to the Goodwife’s body.”

  “You do all the work with the sheep, then?” Jak asked. His face looked a degree darker, and Dyan guessed he was struggling to contain at least irritation, and maybe rage, at the way Narl talked about his sister. “You give the sheep everything they need?”

  “Got a hired man for the sheep,” Narl laughed. “I give the Goodwife everything she needs.”

  Aleena set eating utensils on the table. She set knives and spoons in front of Jak, Eirig, and Dyan, but only a spoon in front of Narl.

  Narl noticed. “Did we lose some knives, woman?” he grunted.

  “Must have.” Aleena made a show of looking on the cabin’s long shelves and shaking her head. “Can’t find them anywhere. Maybe Elber has them out in his shed.”

  “We’ll ask, he’ll be here any minute—I put the sign up for him to come in. In the meanwhile,” Narl pulled a long knife from his belt and sank it tip-first into the wood of the table, “I can eat with this. More than a little blood has been shed by this blade, but it won’t hurt the flavor.” He laughed like a bull, throwing his head back and shaking his whole body.

  “If you carry that as a shearing knife into the pastures,” Eirig grinned, “I bet the sheep shear themselves out of pure fear.”

  “Oh, this is no shearing knife,” Narl said. “It’s a fighting blade. I still have it from the days when I rode scout for the Outriders. Up and down the Wahai, south to Ratsnay Station and beyond, far north into the Jawtooths—nowhere I didn’t roam, on the trail of outlaws and renegades.” His eyes glittered.

  “Did you ever roam to another System? Besides Buza, I mean?” Dyan asked. She didn’t care, really, she was trying to think of a way to get Aleena’s note in front of Jak. Maybe distracting Narl was the way to do it.

  “That where you’re from, girl?” Narl grinned. “Some other System?”

  Aleena carried bowls back and forth from the table to the fireplace, filling each with a big ladleful of stew and replacing it.

  Dyan had been preparing for this moment, and had a place name ready that was as far away as anything she could think of. “I’m from Dahu Sett.” That was a tiny collection of shacks in the Jawtooths that froze solid in the winter. Dyan had been once with her Crechemates, when they were learning about paper and logging.

  “Oh yeah?” Narl wrapped his fist around the hilt of his knife and worked it out of the table. “What part?”

  “What do you mean, what part?”

  “I mean Upper or Lower Sett?”

  Dyan didn’t think there were such places. If there weren’t, the question was a trap. If there were, and Narl really did know Dahu Sett, then his next question would spring the trap—he’d ask did Dyan know such-and-such a person, and she wouldn’t know what to say. All she remembered of the hamlet was the lumber mill and the rows of tiny cabins.

  Or, it could be an innocent question.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “Just Dahu Sett, I guess. By the mill, where my old dad worked. We summered lower down, on the river.”

  Narl nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, and was interrupted by a knock outside the door.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The man who entered was whip-thin and ugly, with a long scar running along the side of his nose. His cotton smock was stained, and he smelled of sweat and animals.

  “You wanted me?” the newcomer asked. His voice was pinched and slow.

  “I need you to go to town, Elber,” Narl boomed. “Step outside with me and I’ll explain.” He sheathed his dagger and flashed a broad grin at his guests. “Apologies for Elber’s smell. He’s come from the fields.”

  Narl pushed out through the door with the hired man.

  “Run,” Aleena hissed. At the same moment, Dyan slapped the note onto the table in front of Jak. He stared at the words, then at his sister.

  “What in Mother’s name is going on here?” he demanded in a whisper.

  “He knows my secret!” Aleena whispered back. “He controls me with it. If I left, or complained, he’d tell the Outriders! But I can’t do anything to protect you—you have to run, as soon as you can manage it!”

  Jak crumpled up the paper in his hand just as the door opened and Narl stepped back inside.

  “Eat!” the big man urged his guests.

  Jak looked like he was about to explode, and Dyan’s own stomach rebelled at the thought of food. Eirig saved the situation, diving hungrily into the chunks of brown meat and white root vegetable that made up the stew.

  Narl sat and took a mouthful of stew. “That’s what I like to see,” he said through the corners of his mouth as he chewed. He pounded the table in front of Eirig. “A boy that eats like that will grow!”

  “I have no choice.” Eirig slurped his food. “It takes a lot of fuel to regrow a whole new arm!”

  “Well, you’ve come to the right place,” Narl gruffed, nodding. “Her cooking is Aleena’s best skill!” He pounded the table and laughed. “Well, her second best, anyway!”

  Jak’s hand trembled as he took a spoonful of the stew.

  “I’m sorry,” Dyan said. She needed to defuse the situation, before Jak’s anger got the best of him. “I must h
ave misheard. I thought you said your name was Alyra.”

  “It is,” Aleena agreed, smiling with relief.

  “This stew is delicious,” Dyan said. “Thank you very much for sharing.”

  Narl looked slyly at Dyan and Jak both. “Well,” he rumbled, “I guess that was the applejack talking. Still, Aleena, Alyra … no difference in the dark, is there, Jass?” He roared with laughter at his own joke.

  Jak forced another spoonful into his mouth with wooden motions. “I think a woman should be called by her own name,” he said. “In the dark or otherwise.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Narl asked. His voice was cold and hard. “You think you have some sort of right to tell me how I should treat my woman?”

  Jak put down his spoon. “There’s a right way for you treat Alyra. What I think is beside the point.”

  Narl rested his hand on the hilt of his fighting knife. “Do you plan to teach me this right way, is that it, boy?” he demanded.

  A voice in Dyan’s head screamed at her to pull out the bola and intervene. One quick move, and Narl would be gone, no longer an obstacle. They could leave, and take Aleena with them. But she didn’t really want to cut anyone down, not even Narl, the bully and blackmailer.

  “I don’t think that is what he meant,” Aleena said, without looking up. “Anyway, our relationship is none of Jass’s business, no matter what he thinks.” She took a spoonful of her stew. “Now please eat.”

  Narl chuckled, but ate. They finished the meal in silence, other than the enthusiastic slurping and sucking sounds that Eirig made as he worked his way through two bowls of food. By the time they had finished, the light through the windows had faded to a deep, dull gray.

  Narl rose from the table and stretched. “When Elber gets back, he and I have work to attend to with some of the animals.” He dug inside his pockets and came out with a smokeweed pouch.

  “Sick animals?” Aleena asked.

  Narl shrugged modestly. “Nothing that can’t be culled out. I think I’ll just sit outside, have a smoke and wait for Elber. “Why don’t you settle our guests? They’ve been traveling. They might like to just lie down now and fall asleep.” He pushed his way through the door and disappeared.

  “We can wait him out,” Dyan suggested. She kept her voice low and they all backed away from the door, to keep their conversation from Narl’s ears. “Just sneak off in the middle of the night.”

  “He knows who I am,” Jak said.

  “Well, it is written all over your face,” Eirig reminded him. “What’s he gone outside for, though?”

  “He’s guarding the door so we can’t escape,” Dyan realized. “And hoping we fall asleep, so his job is easier.” She turned to Aleena. “Are there Outriders in town?”

  Aleena nodded. “In town, or at one of the nearby farms,” she said.

  “So Elber’s gone for reinforcements,” Dyan guessed.

  “We have to kill him now.” Jak picked up one of the dinner knives and looked at it. It was a completely inadequate weapon.

  “Not worth it,” Dyan said. “We have to escape.”

  Aleena shook her head, discouraged. “That’s the only door.”

  “No it isn’t.” Dyan produced the bola. “We can cut a new window out of the loft. We’ll be long gone before he realizes it.”

  “You have to come with us,” Jak said to his sister.

  “I have to stay here.”

  “For what?” Jak’s voice was bitter and fierce. “Do you love him?”

  Aleena shook her head slowly. “I’m a prisoner, really. He takes from me what he wants. But it’s a hard life, and with Narl it’s more or less a safe one, as long as I submit. And I can’t leave. He’ll tell his Outrider friends who I am.”

  “Then we kill him,” Jak concluded.

  “Too dangerous.” She shook her head again. “Besides, you need someone to cover for you. I’ll tell him you’ve gone to sleep, and he won’t realize you’re gone until he climbs up to drag you out.”

  Dyan didn’t wait to hear any more. She grabbed her dinner knife, climbed into the loft, and began working on creating an exit. Eirig joined her.

  “I don’t want to lose you again,” she heard Jak say.

  “Shut your mouth,” Aleena told him, “and grab as much food as you can.”

  The rough irregularity of the log wall let Dyan get her fingers and the bola’s monofilament into its depths. She was soon planing away long chunks of wood. Eirig helped by gouging the tar-and-hair chinking out of the logs, creating new entrances for the bola. In only a few minutes, Dyan had a hole big enough to stick her arm through. Carefully, slowly, she proceeded to carve out a person-sized gap.

  “What happens when he realizes you helped us?” Jak asked.

  Eirig went out the gap first, letting himself down onto the slope behind the house.

  “Don’t you worry about that,” Aleena told him. She practically pushed him up the ladder, looking over her shoulder at the door. “Whatever he can do to me, I’ve had worse.”

  Dyan dropped out the open gap and onto the ground. Eirig squatted in tall dry grass behind the cabin, clutching a dinner knife in his fist. She dragged out the shoulderbags behind her and handed one to the one-armed boy.

  “Sorry we have to leave the spears,” she said to him.

  He waved her off. “We’ll be fine,” he whispered. “So long as we don’t get attacked by anything fiercer than a beefsteak.”

  Jak wormed out after them. There were tears on his face, and Dyan felt her heart snap in two at the sight.

  “Up the canyon,” he whispered. “Quietly.”

  They slipped off the shoulder of earth on which the cabin squatted and crept into a narrow, white-walled canyon. Dyan led the way and walked as fast as she dared, holding the bola in one hand just in case.

  “Stop!” she heard Jak whisper behind her, and she turned around.

  In the darkness of the evening and the shadow of the canyon she could barely see, but after a moment of squinting she realized that Jak was scrambling into an angular shadowed cut leading up one side of the canyon.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed, but Eirig was already following his friend, and she had no choice but to go along.

  On all fours, she felt her way up the cut. It started as a slope, became a twisted ledge to which she clung like a cat on a tree branch, and then became a funnel out of which she crawled onto lumpy sand. Her fingers and knuckles were scraped, and stiff brush clawed at her arms and face. In the darkness, she bumped into her friends, then drew back and climbed up onto her haunches.

  Figures waited at the gate of Narl’s meadow. Standing as they were in the narrow stone mouth, Dyan couldn’t see any detail, but she could make out slight twitching motions in the shadow, and then the gate swung open.

  Four of the figures crossed the meadow too fast to be on foot, and a fifth lagged behind. Scattering sheep bleated their objections, and Dyan realized that the four figures rode mounted on horses.

  “Holy Mother,” Eirig whispered.

  “Shh!” Jak poked him in the ribs.

  Under the bright stars of early evening, the figures gradually came into view. Dyan noticed their hats first, round and broad-brimmed, and then their long, flapping coats.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she whispered.

  “Not yet.” Jak was glued to the scene.

  The riders pulled up in front of Narl’s cottage and Narl himself stood up. Only a hundred feet or so away in the darkness, Dyan could clearly see his face by the light of the smokeweed cigarette.

  Aleena’s bully of a husband stepped forward and spoke to the Outriders, but his words were too low to hear.

  “He’s whispering because he thinks we’re in the cabin,” Dyan said.

  “Shh.”

  Three of the riders dismounted. They stepped forward into the light of the cottage’s windows, cast by the fire within, and then Dyan saw that two of them wore Outrider’s coats and hats, and the third was covered in a Magister
’s cloak. At the same moment, the two Outriders removed their hats.

  Dyan gasped.

  “Holy Mother!” Eirig and Jak cursed together.

  The two dismounted riders were Shad and Cheela.

  ***

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Zarah,” Dyan whispered, looking down at the hooded figure and willing it to reveal its face. Something about the Magister-cloaked person felt terribly wrong. She didn’t think Magister Zarah would have betrayed her, not unless she had been forced to. It seemed ridiculous effort to go to, to warn Dyan off a week ago only to hunt her down and kill her now.

  The thin, scarred figure of Elber caught up to the riders and the Magister pulled back her hood.

  It wasn’t Zarah. The woman in the black cloak was jowled and blonde. She had a drooping nose and one eye that seemed to blink rapidly in the darkness, but her face, on the whole, looked kind. She looked compassionate. She looked like a Magister.

  And then Dyan realized she had seen the Magister before. She had seen her at the Hanging, watching Dyan in the crowd. The Magister said something inaudible and gestured to Shad and Cheela. They went into the cabin, Elber trailing behind.

  Narl drew his knife. It glinted yellow and cruel in the firelight.

  “I should have stayed,” Jak muttered.

  Dyan put a hand on Jak’s arm. He was taut as a bowstring and trembled. “It’ll be fine,” she told him.

  She knew she was lying, but it was a lie she had to tell. She wished she had her bow to hand, and arrows. In the darkness, they’d never see her attacks coming.

  She shook her head to clear it.

  Shad emerged from the cabin. He held Aleena, one hand on the nape of her neck and the other pinning her arm behind her back. She hung slack-limbed, letting him push her, and Cheela came out after them.

  “They were here,” Shad said. “They’re gone.”

  “That’s my woman you have there.” Narl tossed his cigarette to the dirt and ground out its spark with his heel. “They can’t be far,” he growled. “Up the canyon or on the mesa.”