The autumn being now well advanced, I anticipate that this despatch will not find you at Summerfort, my lord King, but that it must be carried to you in the east. That will take time. Since Stag Troop must depart for Winterfort soon, I am entrusting the message to the capable hands of Rohan Death-Blade, who leads the troop in my absence.
(signed) Owen Swift-Sword, Stag Troop Leader
At last the fever abated, leaving me limp and weak, but lucid. I lay in bed, watching Flint as he brought in firewood, chopped vegetables at the table, concocted herbal brews. Sometimes he went away for a while, returning with a hare or bird to skin or pluck and prepare for supper. He didn’t talk much; he hadn’t for a long time. His blunt features seemed thinner. The glow of lamplight on his face served only to accentuate his pallor.
The past began to return to me, but I could make little sense of it. Flint was here, and I was here. But where, exactly? And why? On the few days when it was warm enough, he opened the shutters to let a patch of sunlight fall across my coverlet. But the window showed me only the limbs of a leafless birch, and beyond them pale sky.
I thought perhaps I had nearly died. Under the blankets, my stomach was hollow between jutting hipbones. My knees and elbows were as sharp as an old woman’s. If I looked in a mirror, I imagined I would see a ghost’s face staring back. How long had I lain here helpless? There were a hundred questions I wanted to ask, but I could not find words beyond yes, no, thank you. The moment I began to question, Flint and I would be enemies again. But I grew a little stronger with each day, and there came a morning when I sat up on my own, looked across at Flint and said, ‘I’m hungry.’
He smiled; his eyes lit up; briefly, he was a different man. As quickly, he clamped control over his features and the smile was gone. ‘There’s porridge,’ he said. ‘It seems a fitting breakfast.’
It took me a moment to recall that our first meal together had been a lumpy porridge cooked in the camp near Darkwater, when the worst fear I had of him was that he would take me to his bed. ‘Where did you get the oats from?’ I asked.
‘Don’t waste your strength asking about oats,’ Flint said, turning his back on me and busying himself at the table.
What should I use my strength for, then? Asking questions whose answers I was not sure I was ready to hear? I gazed around the hut – anything other than stare at Flint – while I considered this. I knew the place well by now. It was so small I could see almost all of it from my bed. Everything here was rough-hewn, from the blocky table to the hard bench on which Flint slept, a bed devoid of blankets and pillows – his cloak lay folded at the foot, and a rolled-up sack was at the other end. My bed, by contrast, had several blankets and two feather pillows. A shelf by the table held a cook pot, a few platters and cups, various implements. Beside them was a row of bags containing foodstuffs. The limp form of a rabbit hung from a string, waiting to be skinned for the pot. Close to the door, weaponry stood against the wall: a bow and quiver, a sword in a black scabbard, an axe that did not seem the kind with which one would chop firewood.
What should I say to him? Each possible question gave rise to myriad others. Anything I said, beyond a simple query about oats, might give away what I must keep secret: where I was headed, whom I had spoken to, who had helped me. I wondered if I had rambled in my fever dreams. I wondered whether, in the throes of a nightmare, I had spoken the word ‘Shadowfell’.
Flint removed a pot from the fire, spooned the contents into a pair of bowls, brought one over to the bedside. He set down the bowl, then reached to wedge the pillows behind my back with a deft touch born of long practice. He found the shawl that had lain across my bed and wrapped it around my shoulders. He did not once meet my eye.
‘Eat,’ he said, sitting down on the stool beside the bed and dipping a spoon into the porridge.
‘I’ll feed myself. I must start some time.’
Without comment, Flint put the spoon in my hand. Willing myself to be strong, I took a careful mouthful. He had fed me too many meals to count. Time after time he had seen me turn my head away, unable to eat the smallest morsel. He had cooked broth after broth, gruel after gruel, only to see me retch them up onto the bedding. I would eat this without his help if it killed me. I took another spoonful. Flint held the bowl, his grey eyes as steady as his hands.
‘Good,’ he said when I was finished and had lain back on the pillows, worn out by my effort. ‘I’ll cook the rabbit tomorrow and make you a broth. We have a supply of foodstuffs, running somewhat low at present. I supplement it with my traps. The oats were here the night we arrived.’
So he’d answered my question after all. That surprised me.
‘You should eat your porridge,’ I said. ‘It’ll be cold.’
‘That’s the least of my worries,’ said Flint. He took my bowl over to the table and fetched his own, then stood looking down at me, making no attempt at all to eat.
‘Where are we, exactly?’
‘How much do you remember?’ Flint asked.
I made myself meet his gaze. ‘It’s coming back to me slowly. I was sleeping in a barn and some people found me. They fetched you, and you paid them and took me away. We slept at another farm. Then there was a long, long ride. I think I’ve been quite sick. My dreams were odd. Confusing. There is a lot I don’t remember at all.’
‘It was a long ride, yes. We came up the Rush and over the pass, then down into an area close to a burnt-out settlement.’
My heart was suddenly all bruises. I could no more have shielded my expression than taken the moon down from the sky. All I could do was close my eyes.
‘You should rest,’ Flint said. ‘This is too much for you.’
I drew in a long breath and let it out again. ‘I’m all right. Please go on.’ Corbie’s Wood; it had to be. Somewhere just out there lay the bones of my brother, his ribs smashed by an enemy spear. There lay my grandmother in the grave we had hastily scrabbled out for her. Father and I had fled our home with earth under our fingernails.
‘This hut is attached to a farm,’ Flint said. ‘It’s high on the hillside and invisible from the main track. The place is tenanted in summer, when the sheep are herded up here for grazing. At other times of year it is used for different purposes. To house folk who need a bolthole, for example. You were too sick to go on. I had thought . . .’
He seemed to have lost the thread of what he was saying. I opened my eyes and he turned his gaze immediately away. I waited.
‘I had thought it possible you might not survive.’ Flint’s tone was constrained.
This made no sense. He had captured me. He had paid good silver for me. Then, when it would have been less than a day’s ride to take his prize back to Summerfort, he had brought me the other way. He could have delivered me safe and sound to the king’s fortress before I got so sick I almost died. But here we were a stone’s throw from Corbie’s Wood.
‘Over the pass,’ I murmured. ‘So far.’ There was a powerful longing in me to walk amongst the scattered remnants of my birthplace. To stand by the graves. To speak words of farewell and comfort, the words there had been no time for back then. To sing my dear lost ones the old song. My chest ached with the feeling. I thought of the care with which Flint had tended to me. I considered the undeniable fact that, without him, I would have died. The truth trembled on my tongue. I bit it back. He had been kind, yes. But there was no getting around the fact that he was an Enforcer. Was it possible he had saved me, not out of some feeling of compassion or responsibility, but for another purpose entirely?
Flint was gazing into his porridge bowl with some intensity. ‘Winter is close,’ he said. ‘It was a calculated risk. If I had waited for you to recover before leaving that first place of shelter, it might have been too late to cross the pass before the first snow. And there were additional reasons for moving on.’ He dipped in his spoon and began to eat, as if this were a perfectly ordinary conversation.
I drew a deep breath, summoning my courage. ‘What are your
intentions for me?’ I asked.
‘It’s my turn to ask a question,’ said Flint coolly. ‘When you headed up the Rush Valley, were you still going to the same place you spoke of that night in Darkwater? A place of shelter, where you would have rocks and trees as companions?’
Gods, he had remembered everything. But perhaps that was part of his job. I had told outright lies often enough in the past to escape tricky situations. Lies would not work with Flint. He would see right through me. I scrambled to find a half-truth. ‘The burnt-out village, Corbie’s Wood,’ I said. ‘I lived there once. Everyone is gone, the houses are destroyed, but . . . there must be some places of shelter, caves, old huts . . . That was where I planned to settle, to fend for myself.’ I heard how unlikely it sounded. Flint would think me devoid of any wits at all. And yet, if sickness and foul weather had not both descended on me at once, I could have survived on my own. Those years on the road with Father had taught me many skills. Now, in my weakened state and with winter fast approaching, my intention seemed ridiculous. Unless I allowed my otherworldly friends to help me. Unless I used the gift I barely understood. A vivid memory flashed through my mind: myself pressed in panic against a rock wall, muttering rhymes to Stanie Mon, and the rock embracing me, protecting me. The Enforcers had ridden back to Summerfort. All but one of them, and here he was.
‘You couldn’t have done it,’ Flint said bluntly. ‘Even without this illness you’d never have survived winter up here in the mountains. Where are your traps and snares? Where are your bow and arrows, your skinning knife, your fishing spear? What cave or tumbledown ruin can provide sufficient shelter when ice lies black on every pond and hard frost crackles the earth under your feet?’
I cleared my throat, but said nothing. This was not the manner of speaking I expected from an Enforcer.
‘You asked me about my intentions for you,’ he said. ‘Once before you asked a similar question and I gave you an answer. That answer is unchanged.’
I was growing tired; the good meal, the warm bedding, the luxury of being able to breathe properly, all were combining to make me crave sleep. Had I asked this before? What had he said? I delved for the memory of that night above Darkwater and a strange conversation conducted when I was shattered with weariness, numbed by the loss of my father, terrified of the future. Something about choice. That he was giving me a choice.
‘I don’t understand,’ I whispered, resisting the urge to close my eyes and surrender to sleep. ‘What choice can you possibly offer me?’
Flint was silent. He went over to take a kettle off the fire and carry it to the table. Eventually he said, ‘You should sleep now. Do you need the privy?’
‘No.’ I looked down at my hands on the coverlet. They were pallid, white-grey, the bones stark under the skin. Corpse hands. I thrust them under the blankets. ‘Thank you for looking after me,’ I made myself say. ‘I know that but for you I would have died.’
A long silence; my eyelids drifted shut.
‘I understand it’s hard for you to trust,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not alone in that.’
I opened my eyes, turning my head to see him standing by the fire again, his gaze on me, his expression sombre.
‘There is a choice. You are weary; now is not the time to speak of it.’ After a moment he added, ‘You have a long road to tread before you are well enough to travel again, even accompanied. You don’t like it that I am the one you need to keep the wolf from the door; that comes as no surprise. But I am the one you have. At some point we’ll both have to risk telling the truth.’
CHAPTER NINE
The days passed, and with each day I was a little stronger. As if by mutual consent, Flint and I did not talk again about the future, or about our reasons for being where we were. Instead we worked on my recovery together. Stormy weather meant he would not let me go out of doors except to the privy, but he devised a set of tasks for me, which I performed several times a day under his eagle-eyed scrutiny. Walk to the door and back ten times. Bend and stretch ten times. Circle the arms, circle the shoulders. Time for rest, then repeat the entire exercise. As I grew stronger, he added more difficult elements.
I wondered whether, in his other life as an Enforcer, his duties included training new recruits.
By now I was going out to the privy on my own, and even occasionally bringing in a small armful of firewood from an enormous stack beyond the hut’s back door. On a day when the rain had cleared at last and the sun was making a brave attempt to break through the clouds, I walked a short distance along the hillside, thinking I might fix the direction of Corbie’s Wood, or even perhaps see what was left of it. But the rocky outcrop that sheltered our modest dwelling also blocked out a view down into the valley. I’d need to climb higher up the hill, as far as the band of trees I could see there. My memories of home did not include this hut; it must be further from the settlement than I had thought. There was no sign of the horse that had carried Flint and me on our long and taxing journey. And there was no sign at all of the Good Folk, either familiar or unfamiliar, though I stooped to examine chinks between the rocks and crouched to peer under low bushes, half-hoping, half-dreading that they might be here.
I came back in to find Flint polishing his sword, which lay along the table. The lamplight caught its dark shine.
‘Don’t stray away from the hut on your own,’ he said as if he had eyes in the back of his head. ‘This may be an out-of-the-way corner, but that’s an unnecessary risk.’
‘Where is your horse?’
He glanced up. ‘Gone. It’s too hard to provide fodder up here.’ Seeing my eyes widen, he added, ‘She’s being looked after. Not in these parts. Such a creature, stabled at one of the local farms, would be bound to attract questions.’
I considered this odd statement for a while. I thought of various things to ask and discarded them one by one. Finally I said, ‘Then . . . when you move on . . . you plan to go on foot?’
He eyed me. ‘That depends on a few factors. Where I go. When I go. Whether the snows are here. Whether you’re strong enough to walk the distance.’
I moved over to sit on the edge of the bed, for my legs were tired. It sounded as if he expected me to go with him. ‘So there’s some doubt about where you go next,’ I said.
Flint moved his polishing cloth along the gleaming metal in strong, even strokes. ‘There’s always a choice,’ he said. ‘North or south. Uphill or downhill. Advance or retreat.’
I must have allowed some of my irritation to show on my face, for he set down the cloth and came over, leaning against the wall close by me.
‘This particular choice can’t be made until you’re fully recovered,’ Flint said. ‘I’m hoping you will be fit before the tracks become impassable. We can’t afford to be trapped here over the winter.’
I said nothing.
‘You could tell me where you were going,’ Flint said. ‘If I knew that, I could help you get there. I can see you don’t trust me and that keeps you from being open about it. If it helps, imagine me as one of those dogs that follows you about even when you curse and shout at him.’
I looked at him and he looked at me. I realised I was finding it increasingly difficult to see him as the enemy.
‘Have I cursed and shouted?’ I asked.
‘Not exactly. You talk in your sleep.’
A shiver ran through me. I must not forget what he was. If I trusted the wrong man, I could jeopardise everything Shadowfell stood for. Perhaps I already had.
‘Now you have that look on your face again,’ Flint said. ‘As if you have closed up the shutters.’
I told myself not to hear the kindness in his voice. I bade myself not look into the grey eyes, whose expression was somewhat less guarded than was customary.
‘You’re the king’s man,’ I said flatly. ‘Tell me why I should trust you.’
He folded his arms. ‘I wear the stag, yes. On the other hand, I’m here and I’ve stayed here all this time. You are here with me,
and I haven’t set a hand on you except to tend to you in your illness.’
‘Because you want something from me.’
‘Neryn.’ Flint’s voice had gone quiet. Despite myself, I lifted my head. His eyes were turned on me, steady and sure. If he was dissembling still, he was indeed expert at it. ‘It’s easy enough for me to guess where you are headed. That place is some days’ travel from here and the journey will take you across terrain unsuited to riding. It’s late in the season; there may be storms and the nights will be chill. You’ll need to be well enough to go on foot and make camp by the wayside.’ And when I simply stared at him, unable to tell whether he really had guessed where I was going, Flint added, ‘If I go with you I can ensure you get there safely. If you’d waited for me, that night above Darkwater, you’d have been there long before now.’
That silenced me. He had known where I was going even then? How could that be?
‘You wonder, I think, why I brought you over the pass instead of taking you straight back to Summerfort.’ His voice had dropped to a murmur, as if even in this isolated place, with the two of us behind closed shutters, there might be someone listening for secrets. ‘If I told you I never intended to hand you over to the authorities, would that help you trust me?’
‘If I could believe it, yes.’
‘I don’t expect the whole truth from you, though it would help me considerably if you’d give just a little. Of my own circumstances, I’ll tell you only what you need. We both understand, I think, how perilous knowledge can be when there are those who would wrench it out of us forcibly. Know simply that I am here to guard you. To watch over you. And to ensure you reach your destination.’
So you are not a king’s man? I could not ask him that. With his silver stag brooch and his air of authority, with his kindness and his promises to keep me safe, it seemed he both was and was not. Could he be some kind of spy? That would make sense of more than a few things. But where did his loyalty lie?
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