by David Keck
Dreams of the wreck haunted Durand as a boy: corpses bobbing on bales of wool or following the ship down with the dragging weight of the tin heaped in its hold. Creeping fiends with iron fangs and skin smooth as sheep's gut among the dead. A thrill of fear went through him even now—an armed man, supposedly trained for battle.
But Osseric was a knight in the service of Durand's father. The lost son had been the only heir, and so in a realm where every stump was knotted with a hundred titles, Durand's father picked his second son's future from that shipwreck. With no heir waiting, all Durand must do, the priests said, was become a knight. And that had been Durand's duty for the last fourteen years: fourteen years of bruises among the page boys and shield-bearers in the Painted Hall of the Duke of Gireth in faraway Acconel.
Durand shook his head. He should have sat down at Osseric table and been civil to the man. Osseric deserved to know his heir. After Durand had been to the Col, he would come back and do what was right.
Just then, some motion among the clouds smothered the Gleaning Moon, dropping Creation into utter darkness.
"Hells," said Durand.
Brag stopped.
It was dark as blindness. Durand tried to recall the branches and the sopping leaves over the roots and ruins, but tapped a flood of childhood memories instead. He had played in these woods as a boy, and now remembered crabbed trees, a castle mound in a village of graves, a tumbledown shrine full of blank-faced icons. He remembered roots and ivy fumbling over stone. The realms of the Sons of Atthi were ancient, and most ancient of all was Errest the Old.
As the gray stone icons floated before his mind's eye and the cold stitched ice through his clothes, a breeze skittered through the high branches. He remembered Kieren's talk of the Traveler and the open doors.
"Not clever to dredge up dead men and drowned heirs alone in the dark," Durand muttered, setting his jaw. He was almost home, and there wasn't a twig or stone for leagues that didn't belong to his father. Muttering a charm against the Lost, he waited for a break in the clouds to let a little moonlight slip down. And, with the return of the light, it might have been any evening.
Then he heard a sound—tock—hollow and distant above the rattle of the wind. Thoughts of gates and latches and tombs returned, and the dark poured in.
Durand grunted, but urged Brag on.
Tock.
He turned in his seat. The footpath behind him was black. The sound seemed to issue from somewhere beyond the curl of track ahead. It had a slow rhythm. It might be a length of old chain swinging somewhere—a lost trap or halter. It had to be some such thing.
Durand set his mind to tallying the coin his father would need for the dubbing in Acconel. He didn't much like it. So much silver for this; so much silver for that. Sir Kieren wasn't about to let his shield-bearer kneel in the Acconel high sanctuary in sackcloth, no matter that it might be easier. Tock.
Durand froze. .
The road might have been a black tunnel, a mineshaft. Heedless, Brag thumped forward. Durand reached for his blade, feeling as though he must move his hand with care.
Abruptly, the sound exploded under Brag's hooves: tock-tock-tock. It was the sound of iron shoes on stone. Durand threw his hood back and freed his blade. Cobblestones. It had been these cobblestones all along.
Right below him, the pale stones of the old Acconel road broke the skin of leaves. He likely traveled it a hundred times in childhood and had never heard. Now, every step scraped and clacked at the same note.
Brag must have noticed Durand's twitching; he had stopped dead. "Walk on," Durand whispered. And he heard the sound like a counterpoint beyond Brag's hooves: a staff's brass-shod heel, growing clearer, growing closer. What sort of man walked so blithely through the dark?
The trail opened, parting like curtains, and a huge tree spread black branches into the heavens. Now, Durand knew where he was. This was the Crossroads Elm, the hanging tree. Round the corner would be the open fields below the Col and no place for a man to hide. He could hear the staff still swinging just around that bend. Tock. Tock....
Then there was nothing.
Silence chased the last report into the distance, skittering off like ripples on a millpond.
Durand jerked Brag to a halt, staring at the elm's old trunk. Not a whisper.
In his mind's eye, he saw the stranger stopped, waiting for him just around the tree.
Durand wouldn't sit there shaking. With a snarl, he spurred Brag on. The clatter of the hunter's hooves battered back the silence. With a wild surge, they swung round the great elm and into the open fields of the Col. Vast mountains reared into view. The empty road swung high to the old town between the peaks—and there wasn't a soul for half a league. Neither was there a ditch or a shock of hay to hide in between Durand's sword and the mountains. The stranger had vanished. Durand gave Brag the spurs.
2. Homecoming
Brag got him home. In the dark, Durand's birthplace resembled a madman's stronghold. The ancients had fixed the fortress in a cleft between two peaks; it guarded a pass, now little used. Crowded in that stronghold would be all the family and friends Durand had left behind in his long exile in Acconel.
Below the stronghold, the village was warm with hearth fires and filled with quiet talk from its open windows. Durand marveled at how small the village seemed after years away, and found himself touching the slate walls and hanging eaves. Almost before he realized, he had reached the wall of his father's stronghold.
Sucking in a deep breath, Durand nudged Brag under the gates and into an inner courtyard that stood empty as a drum.
Durand could hear voices up in the castle rooms: a hundred people gabbling. Firelight glowed down from every open window.
"Home," he said, rolling the word like a pebble on his tongue. .
He led Brag across the courtyard and into the acrid warmth of the stables. Over the doors was the Col's coat of arms: the head and rack of three stags, two over one below. Durand took a few moments to scrub some of the water from Brag's hide while the hunter thrust his chin in the air. Durand grinned up at the brute, then, with a gentle slap, set off for the feasting hall.'
In no time, he stood with his hand on the latch as voices throbbed beyond it, unnerved at coming upon a feast from outside and hearing laughter not shared. For a moment, he was like some lost soul blown in from the trees.
Durand turned the handle, and warm air poured around his wrist.
For an instant, no one noticed him.
He had a glimpse of Baron Hroc's liegemen sprawled in the smoky hall of his childhood. Wives sat in circles. Faces shone with grease. Some he knew; some sent his mind searching. A pair of tired serving men were levering one of the tables from its sawhorse trestles, while dogs prowled the reeds to the tune of a skald's mandora.
Then Durand stepped inside.
The skald's fingers stumbled, and everyone in the hall looked up.
"Durand." A black-haired man with an expression of astonishment had spoken. While the face was strange, Durand knew the voice. This was Hathcyn, his brother. The whole of the high table turned, and Durand's mother—strangely small and suddenly ancient—rose to her feet.
"Durand," she gasped. And there was hardly room for her smile in the white frame of her wimple.
THE SWIRL OF hands and smiles and toasts and questions kept the noontide feast alive late into Traveler's Night. The fifth hour found Durand staggering through the chill dark of his father's keep in search of the privy. He was swimming with wine and bursting with beef and crane and swan. He breathed a boozy plume of frost into the air, hardly able to stop smiling. These were his people. This was where he was meant to be.
Somewhere ahead they had hidden the upstairs privy—he was sure.
His palm scrabbled over a corner, then he fumbled into the darkness of a room: the privy, he hoped. A breath of pennyroyal and something rank told him he had guessed right. His scabbard clattered. The branding-iron cold of the stone was enough to make him regret an
evening of warmth by the hearth fires, almost.
When he had finished, he pitched the washrag and a shot of water down the hole and left the little room.
Conversation swirled up the empty passage. Now that the feast's second life was nearly spent, the servants were back to dismantling the trestle tables.
Durand braced himself between the walls, yawning deep and thinking that all the forest omens had come to nothing.
A ribbon of light glinted in the darkness of the hall. As Durand leaned closer, it became an arrow loop crowded with the humped rooftops of the village between the mountains. Beyond the huddled flock of houses, he could see murky hints of the trees and the spot where the old elm would be.
Durand tore his gaze from the narrow window and descended to the hall, where he found Hathcyn weaving through the maze of limbs and tables, carrying a pair of cups. Though slighter than his younger brother, Hathcyn and Durand shared the same face: black mop, dark brows, blue eyes, square jaw—though Hathcyn's had been carved by a finer chisel.
"Here," he said, thrusting a cup toward Durand. "It's hot." Across the hall, the skald croaked out the end of a ballad.
Durand sipped hot sweetness from his cup.
"I was wondering where you'd got to," Hathcyn said. He looked round at the pallets and drowsy knights and their wives. "Girart and Lamis, you remember them? Sergeants? Sons of one of Dad's stewards? They were throwing daggers for clipped pennies. Every blade right in Mother's woodwork. She nearly spitted the pair of them." He winced. " 'Spat' the pair of them? Whichever, she nearly got Lamis.
"Now," he continued. "We ought to find you somewhere to sleep away from—"
"—I'm fine here with the others. Used to it."
"I suppose a straw pallet looks good after the roots and stones you've been bedding down on the last few days."
'The roof'll make a change," Durand allowed, grinning.
A pair of yawning serving boys were struggling to lift a heavy table from its trestles. Durand jerked his chin toward it, and, in a moment, the two baron's sons had plucked the thing from the boys' hands.
"All right you two, where should we take it?" Durand asked.
After a moment, one got up the courage to point down the hall toward the cellar door. "You two get the legs," Durand suggested. "We'll see who gets there first." The two boys nodded and were off, scurrying faster than if Durand had barked an order.
"Mother was pleased to see your face," said Hathcyn as they shuffled the heavy table down the hall. "God. It was a great surprise to have you walk in." Hathcyn stopped a moment, puffing. Blowing hair out of his eyes, he glanced past an unperturbed Durand. "If it isn't the woman herself."
"What are you two doing? Do you know where that's to go? Are you paid to carry it?" the Lady of Col demanded.
"The idea was mine," Durand said.
"And how are you, Mother?" Hathcyn said.
"You're drunk," she replied.
Durand raised his eyebrows. "And how are you keeping?"
She peered at the two brothers for a moment, her chin thrust toward them, then relented. "I'm well enough now all that's done." She shook her head. "Durand, it's good to see you back. What did you think of our feast?"
"Good, Mother."
"Well, I hope you managed to get something hot down you, at the least. You looked cold as drowning when you stepped through that door."
"Warm enough now."
At the far end of the table, bulging veins showed Hathcyn's strain.
"That's good," said their mother. "Your father's glad you came up." "That's good, Mother."
"Can't believe how big you've got. Big as your father. Bigger!"
'Taller, anyway," Durand said. Hathcyn looked to the ceiling for assistance.
"Ah, it's good to see you." Her hand touched his wrist for a moment. There were tables to stack and pallets to arrange and arguments to settle. The stream of servants churned around them.
She hesitated. Out of her sight, straining Hathcyn shot a desperate look down the table—it was heavy.
"You'd best get them in order," Durand said.
"Aye, I suppose I'd better," she said and got back to the business of readying the hall for the night.
"God, Durand," Hathcyn gasped. "Let's get this thing put away." And they slipped the long table through the serving men and down the cellar stairs, where Durand could not help but pitch in, stacking and swinging tables and barrels with the rest.
When the worst of it was done, the two brothers climbed back into the hall. Hathcyrj slapped his hands together and smiled up at Durand.
"You must be about done in yourself."
The last few men still working were stacking a heap of straw pallets in preparation for spreading them in the hall. Durand looked into one face, and asked, "May I?" and found his own patch of bare floor.
The two men sat cross-legged, while Durand set to unwrapping the mud-caked laces around his boots. The leather had gone at turns waxy hard and crumbling soft as flour. Other men were bedding down around him: guests and liegemen.
"I talked to Father," Hathcyn confided. "The harvest was good enough; he's got the coin to pay for all the trappings and whatnot. You can get yourself properly knighted. Imagine though: I was knighted out here under the mountains, and you'll be dubbed in Acconel with the duke right there by Silvermere of the Thousand Ships."
"It'll be a great show," Durand said, emphasizing his point with the boot in his hand—stiff as a clay pot. "Just me, the duke, and who knows how many other shield-bearers all lined up like nags at the horse-fair."
"And don't forget the thousand ships. The duke will bring them out, won't he?"
"If he can stay awake."
"Ah yes, I suppose he's getting on."
Durand set the boot down and made a thoughtful face. "The Blackroots up there are likely older...."
Hathcyn laughed. "I missed you, you know. Always the sound one, no matter that I was older. I'd drag us off into some mad scheme, and you'd stare down the consequences."
"I meant to talk to you about that," Durand said.
"My earliest memories. You had this stern face. A stalwart thing on bowed legs. And now you'll be back to stay."
"Aye." Now, Durand was smiling. One last ride to Acconel, and he would be back to wait out his inheritance, maybe serving in Osseric's stead, if the king summoned the hosts to the Heithan Marches again.
The servants smothered torches.
Hathcyn glanced up from his haunches. "Well, I had better bid you good-night." He gripped Durand's shoulder. "You know it's good to see you. Do you?" Durand winked.
"Good," said Hathcyn, and was off.
Durand settled down onto one shoulder. His father's grand plan: the knighthood, the fosterage at the duke's hall. Each piece fit the next like a joiner's work, and now it was all coming snug together.
He closed his eyes.
"So you've got a place settled then, Lordship?"
A man squatted on the next pallet: the homely skald; his brown eyes glittered on either side of a saddle-backed nose.
"Aye, friend," Durand said. "More or less."
"I apologize," whispered the skald, mirth folding his face into a gap of missing teeth. "I've a habit of butting my nose in where it's not wanted. It comes with the trade. I'm called Heremund, by the way."
"Yes? I see about the nose."
After watching to see that his point was made, Durand closed his eyes once more, listening to lovemaking, farts, and snarling dogs until, finally, the weight of a long day bore him down into sleep.
HE WOKE IN the dark, surprised he hadn't slept through to Noontide Lauds.
The cold of the night had slipped in through cracks and windows, and he might have been sleeping in the hills except for the snoring liegemen all around him.
A mist of fleas jumped against his face as he shifted; he was dully aware of a dozen angry bites. But he had slept on the floor of one man's hall or another all the days of his life and a pallet swarming with fleas
was hardly a new thing.
He wondered what had jerked him out of sleep.
Then a knock echoed through the black feasting hall: something else awake. Durand levered himself up on his elbows but could see no one in the darkness.
Nearby, a ribbon of moonlight glimmered on the wall. On impulse, he reached out, cutting light with his fingers' shadow.
As his fingers spread, he realized that the stone under that ribbon was huge for building work, taller than a man. But it conjured a memory. There had been a ring of standing stones around the well when the Sons of Atthi threw up this fortress. His mother had pointed to this one.
It was odd what a man could remember after years away.
Another knock echoed through the hollow castle, coming from beyond the hall. And another. Durand peered at the source of the light. Between the shutters, a silver thread of light shimmered and twisted as though slipping between some moonlight-spinner's fingers.
He left the blankets and fleas and crossed to the window. As he put his eye to the old boards, the last light of the Gleaning Moon struggled through broken cloud, silvering damp flagstones—and the figure of a man by the well. In his fist was a traveler's staff.
Durand's lips peeled apart.
The light swelled. The staff swung: tock. A battered hat turned.
Durand sprang back from the window. He had caught a glimpse of a knotted beard. It was the Traveler's Night. When Durand turned his eye once more to the narrow moonlight, there was only darkness below. Cloud had stolen the Gleaning Moon but, when its narrow sickle wavered back, the stark slate court was empty.
"Host Below," said Durand and resolved to learn what was going on.
Barefoot, he bolted from the hall with a naked blade in his fist, and skidded into the courtyard. Seeing no one among the doorways and arches, he searched the frosted flagstones for some sign, finding nothing but the curls of his own melted footsteps in the frost as he stalked round the well.
