“She wants to be certain that Astor Skaya really keeps his gate shut. That he doesn’t let some rich merchant pass, some important trader he doesn’t want to offend. If I’m here, shut means shut.”
I sat quite still on the edge of the alcove. Somehow, I had imagined that Callan would be with us always, even if we were no longer in the Highlands. It hurt to find out that I had been wrong about that.
He put his hand on my shoulder for a moment, big and heavy like a bear’s paw.
“Ye’ll do fine, lad,” he said. “You and Nico. Ye’ll have to look after the Shamer now.”
“Nico!” I snorted. What use was Nico, what with him and his I don’t care for swords.
“The young lord has a sensible head on his shoulders,” said Callan. “As long as he decides to use it and grow up. And the same goes for you, laddie. Ye’ll have to learn to think, not just charge in believing ye can meet every kind of trouble with yer sword. Ye have a charge, now.”
I cleared my throat. “I wish you were coming,” I said when I was able to control my voice.
Callan nodded. “Aye. And I’ll miss ye all. But if ye are to be safe, Sezuan must not follow ye. And I promise—he’ll not get past me.”
In his own way he looked as unmoveable as the fortress of Skayark itself. And if we couldn’t have him with us, I thought, at least there was a great deal of comfort in knowing that he stood between us and Sezuan.
Shortly before noon we left Skayark—Mama, the girls, Nico, and I. The horses were tired and tender-footed, and the wheels of the cart looked dented and cracked from the crazy pace Mama had set us the night before. Melli went from shrew to crybaby and back again in seconds flat, what with being so tired; Dina was pale and silent; and I didn’t even want to look at my mother because I was still so angry with her. A jolly party we made, I thought, as we crossed through the Skayler Pass and began the long descent into Loclain.
DAVIN
The Soot-Monster
Loclain was neither Highland nor properly Lowland. There were no true mountains, but the hills were fairly high. There were lots of streams and lakes and woodland. And ferns and moss and mites, and clearings full of tall grass and strawberries, and an incredible number of birds. Sometimes they blackened the skies.
There were more people here than in the Highlands. More villages, and bigger. Some had more than one mill and more than one inn. But of cities like Dunark and Dracana, there were none.
Nor were there castellans and the like. The villages had names like Kettletown, Whittier’s Place, and Ropeham, and that was actually quite telling. In Loclain, any self-respecting village had at least three or four respected craftmasters who were among the best in their craft. People came from miles away to learn pottery from Potter Laurenz in Clayton or smithcraft from Master Hannes of Kettletown. And when decisions had to be made in the villages, the masters had the final say.
We arrived in Clayton late in the day, on the tenth day since we had left Skayark. Tomorrow morning Astor Skaya would once more open his gates, and even though his men would keep an eye out for Sezuan, the risk that he would fool them had grown into almost a certainty—I couldn’t see the guards stopping every single traveler, asking them to show their navels.
At least we had put our ten days to good use. We were many, many miles from Skayark now, and the roads we had traveled by had been small and well concealed. We had even sold the dun mare and bought a small round-backed black gelding just to look different. And Mama hid the Shamer’s signet beneath her blouse and carefully avoided looking at people we met, so that no one would report that a Shamer had traveled this way.
We hadn’t meant to stop at Clayton. But as we rolled into the square between the smithy and the inn, there was a loud crack, and the cart swayed ominously. Mama braked and yelled for Rose and Melli to get off the cart. As she jumped clear herself, there was another crack and a tearing noise, and then one front wheel came off, and the cart seemed to kneel down for a moment, like a tired old priest, before crashing onto its side. The black gelding fought to stay upright, and Nico hurriedly cut it from its harness.
“Oi,” said a woman who had been getting water from the well. “That doesn’t look good.”
And it didn’t. The axle was broken, and everything we had in the cart lay scattered across the fired clay tiles of the square.
“That won’t take you far,” said the woman.
I could see as much for myself. I looked at her tiredly and might have given her a sharp reply if there had been the least little hint of malice in her smile. But there wasn’t. She was just being helpful, as it turned out.
“Tell you what, my Amos is prenticed to Cart-Maker Gregorius in Wheelton, just down the road a little way. He would be pleased to mend the axle for you. You can stay at Minna’s inn the while.”
“Is it expensive, the inn?” Mama asked cautiously.
“Well, not expensive, perhaps. But not cheap either. But if you don’t mind the inconvenience, there is always Irena’s cottage. It’s not much good, to be honest, and a long walk from town, but I’m sure she’ll let you stay there for next to nothing.”
“Where can I find this Irena?” asked Mama.
The woman pointed to the smithy.
“Right there. She married the smith last year, and the cottage has been empty since.”
It was no palace. The thatch was green and black with moss, and the daub walls leaned more than was sensible. There wasn’t much space either—just the one room, with a fireplace at one end and an alcove at the other, and then a ladder leading up to a dark loft.
“Not much in the way of furniture,” said Irena Smithwife, who had shown us the way. “But I’ll get my stepson Olrik to bring you some clean straw so at least you’ll have decent bedding.”
Mama paid her the ten copper pennies they had agreed on.
“Stay as long as you like,” said Irena. “It’ll do the old place good to be lived in once more.”
It felt strange to have a roof over one’s head again. A roof that was almost our own. Strange, but good. Even if there were mice in the thatch—you could hear them scrabble and squeak.
“If we’re going to live here, we’ll need a cat,” said Rose.
And suddenly we were all looking at each other. It sounded so right: to live here.
“It’s only for a night or two,” said Mama. “A week at the most. It won’t take them longer than that to mend an axle and one wheel.”
No one said anything right then, but I’m almost certain we were all thinking the same thing. Why not here? We had to stop somewhere, had to live someplace.
“Ten days,” whispered Dina, and you could hear the longing in her voice. To belong somewhere. To stop traveling, stop drifting with no other goal than to get away. “Isn’t ten days’ distance enough?”
Mama hesitated.
“I don’t know. And we don’t know what sort of a place this is. Let’s not get our hopes up too soon.”
I woke up the next morning and needed to pee. I couldn’t seem to find my boots, so I climbed barefoot down the ladder and opened the door. The sun was shining, and it was already quite a warm day. Grass and errant lupines grew knee-high in the small garden in front of the cottage. I waded through the grass and went around to the back of the cottage to find a quiet spot for a pee. I was barely done when Belle came scampering up to me, tail waving like a flag. She was still only a big pup, and she probably missed having someone to play with. No one had really been in the mood since, well, since Sezuan Puff-Adder turned up to ruin our lives. I laced up my trousers and picked up a long stick.
“Go on, girl,” I said. “Take it if you can!”
Eyes shining with delight, Belle clamped her teeth around the other end of the stick, and we tugged it back and forth between us all over the backyard, trampling grass and goldenrod so that it looked as if a whole herd of wild pigs had passed by. Finally, the stick snapped. Belle chewed contentedly on her end for a while before coming up to drop it expectant
ly at my feet. I picked it up. It was all wet with dog drool, but one would have had to be a whole lot more hard-hearted than I was to resist the expression in Belle’s dark eyes. I threw the stick as hard as I could, and Belle pelted after it, through grass so tall that all I could see of her sometimes was a black and white tail.
“Davin!”
It was Mama calling.
“Back here,” I yelled.
“Can you come and help for a minute? Something is blocking the chimney.”
I went back in. And she was right. Looking up the chimney, I could see only the tiniest pinprick of daylight and a lot of black something. We tried to poke at the something with a long stick, but it was up too high. A lot of soot fell down, and most of it lodged itself in my eye. Ouch. That really stung!
“Dina, get the bucket and the rope and see what the water is like in the well outside,” said Mama. “Davin, don’t rub your eye. You’ll only make it worse.”
Mothers are at their most annoying when they are right. I clenched both hands in an effort not to rub my stinging eye, and a few moments later, Dina came back with a bucketful of well water.
“Smells all right,” said Mama, before taking a sip. “Tastes fine, too. Davin, come here and let me rinse it.”
“I can do it myself,” I muttered.
“Probably. But I can see what I’m doing, and you can’t.”
She washed my face and dabbed carefully at my soot-infested eye. I suddenly felt like a small boy again, being taken care of by my mama.
I was still angry at her over the Puff-Adder, but just not all the time. You can’t be angry at someone every waking moment, not when you have eaten, slept, traveled, and worked together for ten days. Sometimes the anger boiled inside me; at other times it was almost gone. Right then I couldn’t feel it at all.
“Is it better now?”
“Yes,” I said, and thought that everything was, really. Today we didn’t have to bounce along woodland trails. And if we ever managed to clear the chimney, we could eat a meal that had been cooked in a proper hearth, not over a hurried campfire.
In the end, I climbed onto the roof with the aid of our longest rope, which Nico managed to toss so that it coiled around the chimney. I scrambled up the mossy thatch until I could sit astride the ridge, and Nico then tied the rope to a long stick so that I could haul it up and use it as a poker. I bent over the chimney and looked into its dark mouth.
“Looks like a bird’s nest,” I said, prodding at it with the stick. It wasn’t easy, and I had to stand up in order to be able to reach farther into the chimney.
“Careful,” called Mama.
“I am.”
I poked and prodded until sweat was trickling down my face. You would have thought the nest had claws, the way it seemed to cling. Finally, something happened. With a scratchy noise the nest slipped down the flue and landed with a thud in the cold ashes of the hearth. A new burst of soot exploded up the chimney, but this time I closed my eyes in time.
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh!” I yelled.
“And what is that supposed to mean?” asked Mama.
“It means, Gracious Lady, that the deed is done! Victory is ours! Sir Davin of the Stout Stick has finally vanquished the Soot-Monster!”
Melli looked up at me, wide-eyed and open-mouthed. Then she started laughing. I swung the stick in a circle over my head and repeated my victory cry:
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huuuh!”
“Yes, all right,” said Mama. “But come down before you fall. You might break something.”
DAVIN
Homeless Mice
A week later, we were still living in Irena’s cottage. The garden was nowhere near as overgrown now; the horses must have thought they had died and gone to heaven—no work for a week and all that juicy grass.
Some of the villagers were nice, others a bit more wait-and-see. Well, that was fair, I supposed. They didn’t know us yet. Of Sezuan there had been not so much as a whisper, and in all the time we had been in Clayton, no strangers had come by, only people from the nearby villages of Wheelton and Weaversham.
On the seventh day Mama and I went to Irena Smithwife to ask if we could stay, and how much it would cost.
We found her behind the smithy, hanging out laundry to dry in the morning sun.
“Stay?” she said, fastening a peg to the corner of a sheet. “For how long?”
“I don’t know,” said Mama. “Through the winter. Maybe even longer.”
A half-grown kitten was sneaking up on the laundry basket. In a magnificent hunter’s leap it attacked a shirtsleeve that dangled temptingly over one side. Irena pushed away the kitten before it could deliver more muddy paw prints to the clean clothes. She wiped her hands on her apron and stretched, resting both hands against the small of her back. She was pregnant, I suddenly saw. Not showing hugely, not yet, but when she stretched like that it was pretty obvious.
“Come in for a while,” she said. “I’ll make us some rose hip tea.”
We followed her into the house, a solid and well-built brick house with a tiled roof. The smith and his family lacked for nothing, it seemed. And of course Irena had a beautifully crafted iron stove, rather than a simple open hearth. She stirred up the embers, put fresh fuel on the fire, and set the kettle to boil.
“Why do you want to settle in Clayton?” she asked, her back still turned.
“I think we can make a home here,” said Mama quietly.
“Where are you from?”
“The coastlands.” Mama mentioned neither Birches, our old village, nor Dunark, though that, at least, was a name Irena was sure to have heard before.
It was quiet in the kitchen for a while. The kettle on the stove began to hiss softly. I sat there on Irena’s kitchen bench feeling awkward, as though I were a beggar who had come to ask for a boon. But then, perhaps I was. Compared to a well-to-do household like this one, we were a bunch of homeless paupers, and what little money we had would not last us long if Irena demanded more than a few copper marks for her rent. I had never felt poor before, not even when we first came to Baur Kensie and had practically nothing. Poor wasn’t the same as not having much. Poor was when there was something you really, desperately needed, food, shelter, or fuel, and you could not afford it.
Slowly, Irena turned to face us.
“You never look anyone in the eyes,” she told my mother. “How come?”
Mama sat stock-still for a long moment. Then she reached inside her blouse and drew out her signet. “Because of this,” she said.
Irena nodded. “That’s what I thought. Will you do Shamer’s work here?”
“No. I have some knowledge of herbs and healing. I will hold to that. And I would ask you not to mention my Shamer’s gift to anyone.”
Irena looked at her more kindly now. “I have heard of the Dragon Lord and what he does to Shamers in the coastlands,” she said, compassion in her tone. “Here, it is different.”
“I still ask your silence.”
“I shall have to tell a few people,” Irena warned us. “And it is a difficult thing for you to hide in the long run.”
“I would just rather not have the rumor spreading throughout Loclain,” said Mama.
“No,” said Irena. “That I can understand.”
She took the kettle from the stove and poured tea into three tall earthen mugs.
“Welcome to Clayton,” she said, setting the mugs in front of us. “We would be fools to turn away a good herbwife.”
“But the money,” said Mama. “I have to know if we can afford it.”
“Money? You gave me money already. Didn’t I tell you that you could stay for as long as you liked?” She laughed and stroked her rounded belly. “And if you will help bring this rascal into the world, I have already made a good bargain!”
We didn’t say much, Mama and I, as we walked home through the woods. Home. It was a good feeling that there was once again a place you could say that about. And at the same time I felt a funny tension
in my stomach, because it was also a dangerous word. Once you began thinking like that, you started to have feelings for a place. And the fonder you got, the harder it would be if—No, I didn’t want to think of the Puff-Adder now. I wanted to allow myself to be happy.
The path leading to Irena’s cottage—our cottage—was just a narrow trail. A stranger would see no particular reason to follow it. The cottage was invisible until you were quite close. It was almost as if the woods closed around it and shielded it from harm.
Belle began to bark and yip delightedly, and then came charging up to us, tail wagging furiously. Then she sniffed in surprise and tried to get her nose into the basket Mama was carrying. Rose was sitting in front of the cottage whittling clothes-pegs, but when she saw us, she leaped to her feet.
“What did she say? Can we stay here?”
Mama smiled. “We may have to,” she said. “Because we now have a cat. Tell Belle to stay outside for a little while.”
When the bottom half of the cottage door was closed, Mama opened the basket. Out tumbled the tabby kitten Irena had given us.
“There,” said Mama. “The mice will have to move out now.”
“It doesn’t seem quite fair,” said Rose. “After all, they were here first.”
DAVIN
Beans and Letters
We planted beans. It was about the only winter crop that would do us any good this late in the year. Preparing the soil was back-breaking work. There was a garden of sorts behind the cottage, but the woods had had a free hand with it for nearly two years, and it showed. We borrowed a dung fork from the smith. We had a spade ourselves, or at least we did until Nico managed to lose it.
“I don’t understand,” he said and looked about in confusion. “It was here a minute ago!”
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