by Nathan Hawke
‘No different from the rest of us then. Reckon my Gallow would have said the same too. Kept your head, that’s what matters. Better than some would do.’
‘You didn’t look like you were scared at all.’
Nadric and the children were stirring now – the light or the smell of Arda’s pot perhaps – and more of the villagers from Middislet were coming to sit around the fire, muttering to each other, whispering their stories. Arda picked up her pot and came and settled beside Reddic. ‘I was scared right enough, lad. I’ve had one husband lost to the forkbeards and another lost to the sea only to show up again three years later. I’ve carried five children and lost one when it could barely lift its head. Jelira and Tathic I’ve seen sicken and nearly die and then fight their way to the living again. I had one forkbeard in my bed for eight years and another for nearly two. I had the Widowmaker himself in my house and stitched closed a hole in his head – though not until after I’d had a good long think about dashing his brains out, mind. Shadewalkers? I’ve met men who’ve hunted them. I was in Witches’ Reach when the forkbeards were about to storm it. The Wolf hadn’t crossed the bridge out of his swamp and we were all going to die, and badly too. I had the iron devil of Varyxhun in my yard once and his fingers around my throat. So I’ve seen a lot that’s made me scared and would give me the shits again if it cared to, but I know how to deal with it. Put another few years on you and you will too.’ She glanced behind Reddic to where Jelira and Feya and Tathic and Pursic were sitting in a row, all quietly watching her. ‘Them.’ She nodded, and for the first time Reddic had seen, a smile settled over her face, a real warm smile full of love. ‘They’re what keep me going. There’s nothing in this world or any other that scares me like the thought of losing my little ones.’
‘I’m not little any more,’ grumbled the older boy. ‘Pursic’s little. I’m not.’
‘You’re all still little to me,’ Arda snorted. ‘Who wants to eat?’
She lifted the pot and passed it round, tipping some sort of runny white sludge onto old wooden plates she must have liberated from the same place she’d found the food. The children eyed it hungrily and Nadric already had his fingers in it when Arda raised a hand. ‘Wait!’ She took out the pouch she’d thrown at Reddic back in the house, the magic Aulian salt. He watched in amazement as she sprinkled a few flakes onto each plate. ‘Just a little, mind.’ She crouched in front of her children. ‘Remember how I told you I met a wizard from Aulia last time we all had to run away, when the iron devil came?’
‘Before da killed him and made you safe again,’ said Jelira loudly.
‘Which da?’ the smaller of the two boys turned to look at the bigger one.
‘Both of them, actually,’ said Arda without even a blink. ‘They did it together. And that was when I met a wizard from Aulia. He gave me this magic powder to keep us all safe. Just a pinch of it and those shadewalkers won’t hurt us.’
‘Is the wizard here?’ Pursic’s eyes were as wide as saucers.
Arda shook her head. ‘He had to go somewhere else.’
‘He was sent away to be hanged for helping our real da,’ said Jelira. ‘And then our real da went away to save him.’
‘That’s right.’ Arda looked uneasy now. She put a hand to her mouth and heaved a long deep breath.
Tathic sniffed at the porridge and tasted it. His face lit up. ‘Does that mean we can go home now?’
‘I don’t want to go home,’ said Jelira. ‘I want to find Gallow.’ She turned to Reddic. ‘He’s still in the mountains near Varyxhun. He went to help Valaric the Wolf fight the forkbeards and send them away.’
‘If he didn’t get himself killed already,’ whispered Arda.
Reddic leaned forward. He smiled at Jelira, taking her attention for a moment. ‘Not many call him Valaric the Wolf these days. Mostly the Crackmarsh men call him Mournful. Wolf was his name in the war against the forkbeards.’
‘So why do you call him Mournful?’
‘Because he lost his family in the war, and even though that was more than a dozen years ago now, he still mourns for them.’
Jelira’s eyes grew wide. She took a step closer. ‘Did the forkbeards kill them?’
‘No.’ He almost told them how it had been cold and starvation and how a shadewalker had walked through their village one late autumn day and cursed them all, but then he looked at them, cold and hungry and with their village filled with shadewalkers, and thought better of it. Instead he dipped his fingers into Arda’s porridge. He looked down at the children and made a happy face. ‘Mmm! Good! I might have all of this!’
It might have been an accident that Arda kicked him right after he said that, but he could have sworn he saw just the tiniest flicker of a thank you on the corner of her mouth. They talked for a bit after that about what they should do, all of them together. Go back to Middislet maybe, since shadewalkers were wandering things who never stayed in one place for more than a night. In the end they agreed that Reddic and a couple of the men from the village would go and have a look and see whether it was safe. They didn’t wait for Valaric’s two guards to wake up, and Reddic spent half the walk imagining Arda giving them a good shaking and shouting-at until they were awake enough to realise their caves had been overrun by fifty-odd men and women and children and they hadn’t even noticed.
It was an easy enough walk to Middislet and back and the air was a lot warmer that morning. Dull grey clouds filled the skies and a wind was blowing in from the north and the west, freshening with each hour they walked. They reached Middislet with the sun at its zenith and found the village half empty but not dead. The shadewalkers were gone. When Reddic looked, there were a few villagers already back in their homes, those who’d hidden in their cellars or walked or fled a different way and come back in the morning, as Stannic had done. He talked to them until he had a dozen different stories saying which way the shadewalkers had gone or how many they’d been – five, fifty, a hundred, and every possible way except north. Reddic settled for there being maybe a dozen and they’d headed roughly south. It amazed him that no one had been killed. It was the forkbeard Gallow, he heard one of them say, who’d told them about shadewalkers and what to do when they came. He’d played games with the children, the ones whose parents would let a forkbeard monster anywhere near them, and he’d pretend to be the shadewalker and they had to see how close they could get without him touching them.
Reddic even tracked the shadewalkers a little way, before a fine drizzle made him think better of it. On the way back to the Crackmarsh the rain fell steadily heavier, blurring the snow and then washing it away, but the last tracks he’d seen had the shadewalkers going south, close past the caves, and maybe it would be better to get back to Middislet tonight after all. He hurried and ran the last few miles, leaving the others to follow, but when he got back to the caves, Arda came running out. She grabbed him by the cloak and shook him, and this time there was no hiding her fear.
‘Jelira’s gone.’
And all he could think of was that it was cold and it was raining and it would be dark soon and then it wouldn’t just be the shadewalkers that came out. Here in the marsh it would be the ghuldogs too.
13
CROSSING THE WATER
‘I came this way before,’ Gallow told her after he’d settled the argument about how to get to the Crackmarsh by simply riding off, and after she’d finished shouting at him and threatening to kill him when she’d had no choice but to follow. ‘After Lostring Hill I went back home, close to the edge of the Crackmarsh. This is how I came to Andhun from there.’
They stopped beside a frozen pond. Mirrahj reversed her spear and smashed the ice around the edge so their horses could drink. Gallow drew a map in the snow with a stick. ‘The Crackmarsh is here, the Ironwood here. We go around the top of the Ironwood and then cross the marsh to the Aulian Way. The road leads to the Varyxhun valley.’
Mirrahj pinched her lips. ‘Crossing the Crackmarsh? So there is a way.’
‘Probably about a dozen.’ Gallow yawned.
‘And you know them! Tell me!’
Gallow shook his head. ‘You’ll see soon enough. Until then it gives you another reason not to kill me in my sleep.’
‘And why should I do that?’ Mirrahj spat a laugh at the snow. ‘We’ve both turned our backs on our people now.’ When he took her hand she flinched and snapped it away, got up and went back to the horses. He understood her bitterness. ‘Well, I have no secret to hold over you, forkbeard, yet I’ll sleep easily enough. I don’t think you’re the throat-cutting sort.’
‘No.’
They passed two nights together, huddled up in the best shelter they could find with the horses standing over them among a thick stand of trees on the first night, with a fire Mirrahj managed to light from the last handful of tinder she carried. The air was still bitter with a killing cold and snow still lay on the ground, but at least the winds hadn’t come back to flay the skin from their hands and faces and strip the last of their warmth away. On the second night they found a crumbling shepherd’s shelter. When morning came, Gallow’s horse was dead. After that, a wind picked up. Heavy grey clouds scudded in from the north and the west and it began to rain, dreary, relentless and grey; but Gallow had been this way once before, and although years had passed since the Vathen had driven the Marroc from this part of the land, none had come back. When he finally found the farmhouse where he and the Screambreaker had fought a handful of Vathen together, it was still there, still with a roof and its torched barn, empty and abandoned for all those years. Mirrahj nodded and looked impressed. ‘And I’d thought you were bringing us this way just to see whether a Vathan was tougher than a forkbeard or the other way around.’
There were benches. Blankets. Everything the way he remembered it. There were dead Vathen too, three of them out the back by the remnants of the burned-out barn, one out the front, the one the Screambreaker himself had killed, and one still in the house, all skeletons long since picked clean by whatever animals had found them. Gallow dragged the one in the farmhouse outside in bits and pieces, a reminder of the war that neither of them wanted to remember. Mirrahj coaxed her horse into the shelter of the house and tended to it while Gallow searched through the larder. Everything was long gone, eaten or dissolved into mould, but outside in the ruined barn he found a crate with a sack of grain in it that was dry and only tasted slightly bad. He took it back to the hearth and filled an old pot with rainwater that had collected among the ruins. There was even firewood in the house, cut and ready underneath thick cobwebs, sheltered from the rain. Farm tools too, and when he searched he found a handful of precious flints. By the time they’d scraped enough shavings of wood to make tinder and lit a fire, the sky was dark as pitch. Neither of them said a word. They listened to the hammering of the rain and the wild tearing of the wind and stared at the fire, warming themselves, always watching to make sure the flames kept alive. As the house shed its icy chill they stripped off their soaking furs. The grain, after Gallow had boiled it soft, tasted of mould, but after three days without warmth or food it was like seeing the sun again after weeks of storms. They ate in silence, and for the first time since they’d left Andhun, Gallow eased himself out of his mail and let the warmth of the flames bathe his skin. ‘We’ll be in the hills tomorrow. There’s not much shelter. Then we cross the Crackmarsh, dawn to dusk. The ghuldogs won’t trouble us as long as we’re out by sunset. The water meadows will be growing now. Might have a skin of ice at sunrise if the rain stops but don’t let it fool you – you’ll go right through as soon as you put any weight on it.’
Mirrahj shrugged. ‘We have warmth and shelter. We should wait a day here. Rest until the weather breaks.’
Gallow drew out a knife and sharpened it on a whetstone. When the edge was good enough, he tugged at the stubby beard he’d grown in the days since Hrodicslet and lifted the knife to it.
‘You should leave that,’ said Mirrahj.
He stopped and looked at her. ‘To what end?’
‘What are you, Gallow? Are you Marroc or are you Lhosir? Which is it?’
‘Can’t I be both?’
‘No. You may live among both and worship the gods of both but you cannot be both. What were you born?’
‘You know very well I was born a brother of the sea.’
‘And in your heart which are you?’
‘Both and neither.’ Gallow lowered the knife and poked angrily at the fire.
‘You left your family to fight Sixfingers. Is that what a Lhosir would do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it what a Marroc would do?’
Gallow hesitated, which was answer enough in itself. ‘Some of them,’ he said.
Mirrahj looked at him hard. ‘You’re a Lhosir, Gallow Foxbeard, not a Marroc. However much you want to be, deep inside you have a forkbeard soul. That’s how you were made and it’s a thing you can’t change. Be what you are, forkbeard.’ She bared her teeth at him and then nodded across the fire. ‘In my saddlebags you’ll find a piece of waxed paper wrapped around some cheese. It’s more than a year old and it comes from my homeland. It has a flavour strong enough to kill children and it’s the most delicious taste in the world. Get it and I’ll share it with you.’
Gallow found what she wanted and unwrapped it. The stink climbed up his nose and stabbed him right behind the eyes. ‘Maker-Devourer!’ He almost dropped it, then tossed it to Mirrahj. She cut off a piece and tossed it back.
‘Vathan horse cheese, aged to perfection.’
He sniffed and promptly sneezed. ‘That stinks, and of strong stale piss.’
Mirrahj waved the knife at him. ‘You found us this house, forkbeard, so I’ll forgive you a lot, but not that. You eat or you fight now.’ Her mouth was angry but her eyes were smiling. Gallow took a deep breath and bit a piece. For a moment he let it sit inside his mouth, trying hard not to taste anything at all. Then he felt it wriggle, made a face and spat it across the room. ‘It moved!’
Mirrahj collapsed with laughter. ‘Your face! O forkbeard, your face!’ He glared as she cut a piece for herself and chewed it. ‘I’m not trying to trick you, forkbeard. This is what we eat, but I’ve yet to find anyone other than a Vathan who has a taste for it.’
She turned the cheese and pinched at something and then delicately withdrew a slender reddish wriggling thing. A worm. Gallow screwed up his face. ‘You can keep your cheese, Vathan.’
‘Forkbeard, this is how we welcome one another when clans meet. I invite you into my shelter. We share milk and I promise to protect you as long as you remain in my house; and by accepting my food you promise to protect me too, and my family. We might be enemies the moment you cross the threshold, there might be blood as bitter as wormwood between us, but when you come into my home and drink my milk, you vow to be my brother until you leave. You forkbeards welcome your guests by breaking bread and sharing ale with them but we don’t have bread and ale.’ She cut another piece of cheese and picked out the worms. ‘Here. It’s not exactly milk either, but it was once.’
Gallow forced himself to swallow as quickly as he could and washed it down with a long gulp of water, trying not to be sick. His stomach rumbled. Mirrahj got up and walked into the shadows in the far corner of the house. She stripped off her mail and her woollen shift and wrapped herself in a blanket. She hung the rest of her clothes neatly around the fire. ‘You should do the same. It’ll be nice not to be sodden for a while.’
Gallow was already stripped to his woollen shirt. ‘Aye, before I sleep I will.’
‘It’s customary, as a stranger who’s shared my milk, that we should tell each other of our deeds.’
‘You already know mine. I’ve told you everything that matters.’
Mirrahj shuffled closer and sat next to him beside the fire. ‘But not the Vathan way.’ She touched his face and ran a finger along the length of his nose, over the dent near the bridge and along the old white scar that ran beneath his eye. ‘Some wo
unds tell their own stories, others speak in hints and whispers. Where did this one come from?’
‘A Marroc.’ Having her so close was unsettling. He felt on edge, tense, and was suddenly very aware that she was naked under her blanket.
‘A Marroc? Just a Marroc?’
‘It was my first proper fight under the Screambreaker. Not far from Kelfhun. The Marroc then weren’t as they are now. They still knew how to be fierce. It was a hard battle.’
‘A whisker closer and you wouldn’t have seen the end of it.’
For a moment Gallow laughed, remembering the day. ‘I knew he’d hit me. I felt it. I didn’t feel the pain but I felt the blow and suddenly I couldn’t see. I thought he’d taken my eye out.’
‘He very nearly did.’
‘I hit him and hit him and hit him until I knocked his shield down, but I didn’t kill him. The man behind me did that. Quick fast lunge through the throat the instant that shield dropped. The man who held that spear was Thanni Ironfoot’s cousin. He died a year later. Ironfoot spoke him out. I was there to make sure he remembered that thrust.’
She traced another line along his cheek, fresher and redder though still years old. ‘This one?’
‘A Vathan. Lostring Hill. I don’t remember his face or anything about him. I didn’t kill him either.’
Her finger moved across the side of his throat. ‘This one?’
He froze. He forgot that one, now and then, and then he’d find himself running a finger over it. ‘From a Marroc, but a different kind of battle.’ That was the night he’d found Arda. She’d been on the road from Fedderhun to Middislet with little Jelira on her back and a basket on her head. And it was late and there was no one else about and he was lost and trying to find his way to Varyxhun and the Aulian Way and so he’d walked towards her, a forkbeard, and she’d stopped and put down the basket and little Jelira and come to him swinging her hips because she had a child to protect and everyone knew what forkbeards did to Marroc women. And he’d stopped to stare at her, wondering what she wanted and why, and when she’d come close he started to ask her the way to Varyxhun and she’d flung her arms around him and then slid behind him, and the next thing he knew she had a knife at his throat and was making a fine effort to cut it. It had been a close thing but he’d thrown her off, bleeding from the gash in his skin, and he might have killed her or done what she’d thought he wanted in the first place, but he’d seen five years of that with the Screambreaker. So he’d taken the knife and then helped her to her feet and carried her basket for her while she carried her little girl, and he’d asked her about Varyxhun and found that he’d gone completely the wrong way out of Andhun and would have to cross the Crackmarsh. And she’d brought him into her home and they’d broken bread together, and he might easily have gone away the next morning but it turned out that there was a forge in need of a smith, and he was a smith in need of a purpose, and so he’d stayed a few days to help with a few things, and somehow one thing had led to another and he’d never left.
