Snakewood

by Adrian Selby

  It was as we spied on a huntsman a way off the track with some coneys at his waist that Petir had a desperate idea. I was to pretend I was alone and lost, used as bait for any curious herders or farmers, unwary of my murderous brother waiting to ambush them. For a time I was terrified of him, of what the hunger did to him. He threatened to leave me if I didn’t follow his plans, and that was more terrifying still. So I would feign that I had hurt my leg, lifting my skirts to show each man a good part of my thigh, and a bruise which he had kicked me to bring out. I had learned a little native Westhill and Laggie from my tutors, to avoid having to answer questions in King’s Common. More than once they’d got me under them, despite how I fought and screamed, before he came and killed them for whatever they had on them, hares, fish, eggs, bilt and robes to keep us warm.

  The last time we did it, it was a shepherd, his sheep the first life we’d seen in days. But it seemed the shepherd had once had some training; he saw Petir coming at him, knocked his knife away and went for him. They wrestled and fought for their lives. Twice he’d kicked at me or threw me off as I tried to interfere. I saw Petir’s knife near my hand where I’d just been thrown and picked it up. He had rolled over on top of my brother and got his hands on his throat, a hacking laugh as he hit Petir’s head against the earth. I had frozen, wet myself, resigned to it until I saw his struggle end, his arms falling back. Then I snapped; I went into a frenzy at the thought I’d let my brother down, had let him die and left myself alone. I stabbed the shepherd square in the back, drove it in and tried to hold onto him as he grabbed at me to pull me off him. Petir choked then; I saw him move, fight for breath, wheezing and wriggling away from us. The shepherd grabbed my arm and started to pull me off him. I grabbed the hilt of the knife as leverage and as it moved inside him he let go and howled. I twisted the hilt and he fell forward screaming in pain. Moments later Petir got to his knees, and, with a heavy stone, smashed his head open.

  That was the last time we did that. Petir had recovered somewhat a few hours later and we took an arm each and dragged the shepherd to a ravine and threw him into it.

  We killed one of the sheep and I told him how to get some leg cuts. He didn’t curse me for giving him instruction as he usually would, didn’t insist he knew what he was doing when it was clear I was right. It wasn’t something that’s happened often in my life since, being listened to by the men around me. We couldn’t get a fire going with the little wood we found before a blizzard tore through the pass. We had the shepherd’s cloak and he wrapped it round us both as we sat against a tree to escape the worst. He told me the story of Ramban’s Necklace that night, like he used to a few summers before, his voice quivering and breaking with the severity of the assault, and he still attempted impressions of the lovelorn servant, the princess and the rebellious queen bee. We filled our cups with snow and made our vows that we would die together, and I was happy for a few hours.

  Dawn was bright as new steel and when I woke it was to the smell of smoke, a weak fire to do the meat. He had been crying. That was my apology.

  After a few hours’ walking we followed a path through pines that opened out to a precipice with a view across the southern peaks of Jua’s Teeth to the fabled Jua itself. Seeing what must have been the edge of it on the horizon encouraged us to abandon some caution and push down on to more travelled tracks, hoping to find someone we could beg some food from.

  A Post pathfinder unit caught up with us as we struggled through the snow on a track through a pass. All of them were sodden with over a month’s travel through Donag, leading the horses due to the ice and treacherous footing. Their red cloaks were blackened and most of them stared at me as though I were a hot fresh ham as they surrounded us.

  Their captain, Nielus, was a weary and disgraced ex-Marschal, running the southern Donag routes with this sly band that I soon learned was preoccupied only with their next rise and what lay under my robe. They’d lost a horsehand two days before and killed another while risen and arguing on a bad mix. Nielus was a giant, he seemed to fill the camp, eyes of an owl that kept the boys in order, dismayed at whichever cleark had signed up such young soaks to the Red. He had a stinking oily grey beard and an exquisite leather helm worked around bone horns, a helmet he’d taken from the head of a warlord the Post had had to kill after it had hit a few of their caravans. But despite their complaints that we’d slow them down when they were desperate to collect their pay and get cooked to a stupor, he’d seen how wretched we were. He was faithful to values Alon later told me had long since been renounced by the Post, the Farlsgrad Creed, a code of honour that the Post had when it was less the power it is now, when its reputation was everything, its relations with the people who lived in or near the Wilds making the difference between its caravans getting through or being raided and enslaved. They did little more than mock him for it when he used it to justify them sharing some bisks with us, but they didn’t disobey him. There was a respect built on fear, a ruthlessness I never got to see. Petir put me on the recently spare horse and he led me for the rest of the day.

  That evening, as Nielus helped me off the horse to ready a camp, he asked if I’d go with one of his crew to help carry some wood. “I’ll keep you safe with this lot, I promise,” he said. “Sten, take her with you to fetch some wood for the fire.”

  “She’ll give you a hand with yer wood, I’m sure,” shouted one of the others, and the crew laughed.

  “You heard of the word ‘impropriety’?” said Nielus.

  The man, Sten, shook his head.

  “It means touch her and I’ll gut you. He’ll behave, girl.”

  I looked to Petir, who was with three of the others and sharing a cup of their shine. He was trying not to look at me, and one of the others put their arm around his shoulder and started singing. I was angry that they were distracting him, playing a game to get a rise out of me.

  Sten had me carry the torch as he looked for dead wood and otherwise took his hatchet to branches within reach, leading me away from the camp. He moved through the trunks around me, silently, and he spoke, from the darkness, of my beauty, my red hair being as beautiful and bright as the torch, of how he hoped he could help my brother and I if I helped him, if I was just willing to hold him, for it had been many years since any woman was willing to do it. “I’m not a woman,” I told him, but in the silence I heard him breathing, hard and fast, and he asked if I’d lift my skirts for just a moment, vowing not to approach, promising a share of his bacon rinds.

  “I want to go back,” I said, disgusted with myself for my eyes were filling up and I felt powerless again. He laughed and stepped forward, wiping his hands on his cloak, still stiff.

  “You did help with the wood, Manady was right. I might let you touch it tomorrow, seeing as how you can’t take your eyes off it.” He grabbed it like I’d seen so many of Kailen’s Twenty do back in my father’s halls, chasing whores. It enslaves them all doesn’t it, the cock.

  “There’s worse than me in that camp, girl, remember that. Don’t think Nielus is immune to you either; there’s a lot his wife has no clue about, and them others, they wouldn’t have shown such courtesy as me to keep their needs to themselves. You don’t know how it gets and how hard to show manners out here in these winters running these routes.”

  The following day he kept in line with Petir and I, asking about us, and I had no chance to tell Nielus what he had done. It was that evening when I refused Nielus’s request to help him that I was able to say why. Nielus listened, then said that he and I would collect wood, Sten could tend the horses, oil their hooves. I could see that despite a night’s soak that had made him sullen all day, the crew had Petir on their shine again.

  “I’ve got something for you, Galathia,” said Nielus, once we were away from camp. He had stopped dragging the slenka they’d made the previous night, which would help us take a bigger load of wood back. “I’m sure that’s what that idiot was saying to you last night, but they aren’t a good lot at the best of
times, and you being around is getting them rowdy and stupid. I won’t abandon you out here though.” He held up a knife, a short fat blade, the one I keep with me still. He held up with it a small black pouch and a rag. “Let me show you how to use these. Not for show. Never for show. If you use this knife right they should never see it, and this pouch is a paste of poison I made from lobelia blocks that I salvaged from a caravan run went bad. Few counters to it here in the north and it brings a terrible death. We have an hour, and I’ll set up camp earlier tomorrow so I can teach you a bit more.”

  He held out his arms to hug me. I accepted, and was grateful.

  “I’m sorry for whatever has happened that you and your brother, both highborn it seems from the way you are, and how little used to the world, should find yourselves in these parts in winter with nobody looking out for you. I’ll do my best to get you to our Post House at least.”

  So he taught me, showed me that if they couldn’t see the knife they might assume I was unarmed, but that I must never assume the same, that they mustn’t ever get a hold of me if they’re wielding a knife or it’s over. Above all he taught me not to hesitate; move quickly and savagely were his words, unthink.

  In the days that followed, the marching and the hours before sleep, Petir was drawn more and more to the men, who goaded him for being a boy, for being colourless, for not knowing the truths of the sinkworm, a wild opia mix that left him stupefied under my nursings. He grew distant from me, becoming addicted to the pipe, and he began treating me as his servant as much as I became theirs. Nielus saw it, and so insisted that after I’d gathered wood I join him, and he shared some caffin beans with me when I brought him his mixes at the end of the day. He wouldn’t join in with them as they cooked, smoked and sang to a flute that their drudhan, “One Knee” Manady, had learned as a boy on the ships. As I sat with Nielus he told me his story over those weeks.

  He had a son who seemed to hate having been born to him and his wife, a sister that disinherited him, but a wife who he loved and loved him back, who’d bring their horse and trap up to the Post House from a village twenty or so miles over the border when he was due in from a run. It was a love that had persisted even through his being captured by wildmen, who tortured him, left him with just a few teeth and plenty I didn’t see I’m sure, on his last campaign as a soldier for the Donag, his people, many winters before. His brother and father were eaglers, and therefore of a high rank, but he lacked the talent for it. Once soldiering was over through his injuries inflicted as a prisoner he was only able to prove himself useful to the Post, earning tolerable coin for his knowledge of the mountains around us, and their people. Soon he became a Marschal; he led his Reds well, running the routes from Jua north through Mount Hope to Citadel Hillfast with few disruptions for a while. His lieutenants, however, exploited his weakness at administration and keeping account, his trust in them betrayed, many hundreds of silver embezzled before the thefts were discovered and the blame seeming to be his. The High Reeve had a choice between killing him and removing him. His reputation for honouring the Creed was something the Reeve greatly admired, and so his disgrace was engineered to save his life and he took it without question. His wife was there through his rise and fall, their becoming wealthy and then disgraced. They had to leave the heart of Donag society and discovered that life was not as hard as they’d feared at its border with Jua, but instead a deal quieter and more honest.

  I think of him often, the love he had that was unaffected by coin or reputation. I doubt Alon’s love for me matters more than either of the latter.

  My time with them, and Petir, ended savagely. Our luck had run out again, as did Nielus’s, but not before Sten’s. I did my best to gather wood or water with either Nielus or my brother. Daily I had to retreat if I ventured out looking for plant and saw one or more of Sten’s little crew, slipping out of the camp at the same time, hoping to loop around to me. It became a game for them, played under the eyes of their captain and my brother, who by now had decided that it was indeed just a game such as men play all the time with young women. He thought it would teach me something of the world.

  Finally, there was an occasion I went looking for berries while they were cooking a rise and I didn’t notice the pursuit. It saved my life and cost them theirs. The three of them left camp shortly after me. Nielus was dozing, Petir slumped with the others while Manady cooked. I had found a few patches of blackberries on slopes away from the path and started filling my hat when I realised one of the patches had been picked clean, more than the work of birds. I heard laughter echoing up from the clearing away through the trees and my stomach floated like a feather for a beat as I realised we weren’t alone on paths where there were no known settlements.

  “Here she is. What a good girl.” The crackle of phlegm and Marolan accent belonged to Gerin, the oldest of Nielus’s crew, face hollowed by his lack of teeth. He stood with Sten, who gave me a bow.

  “We would like a dance, my lady,” said Sten, “we’ll pay well.”

  “We’re not alone up here; someone’s been at these berries,” I said.

  “Some hungry bears perhaps?” said the other, a nose like a rodent’s snout, a chin that receded into his throat as though to escape his face.

  “I’m hungry myself, hot cherry pie,” said Gerin.

  “You’re second, Gerin,” said Sten. “Boys, get the rag on her to shut her up.”

  The rodent stepped forward; he expected no resistance. I put my hand to the small of my back where the knife was side on in the scabbard and I tucked it flat so it sat against my wrist, a reverse grip. As he approached and reached out it must have looked as though I had batted his arm away with my hand. He hissed and looked at his hand to see a thin red line running across his palm.

  “The little whore just cut me,” he said, holding his hand up to the others.

  Sten laughed and reached for his own knife. “I can’t tell you how happy I am about that.”

  The rodent shook his head, holding his hand up again. He had begun shivering, his fingers flexing, the fear evident as he looked back at me, realising he’d been poisoned.

  “Help me!” he shouted. “Her knife was juiced.”

  “What’s the mix,” yelled Sten, his fraternal affection immediately overcoming his ardour.

  “Pure lobelia,” I said.

  The rodent fought to control his breath but he looked to be cramping all over. He started to weep, reaching for his crew who had stepped back from him. I wouldn’t see anything work as fiercely as that again until I was at the Juan Academy.

  “Drop the knife or I swear on The Red this will go far, far worse for you,” said Sten.

  “Fucking make me,” I said. I had no real idea of the danger I was in. I was flushed with the power of what I’d just managed, sick of the fear and worried still for who might be watching us. I believe a sort of instinct must have overtaken my sense.

  Gerin smiled, far less concerned about the rodent. “You know what, boys, if anything, she’s getting me even more horny.” He pulled open his breeches to show me a modest but stiff cock, some command or wish on the verge of being spoken when his eyes widened at the crack of a pine cone behind me. Without looking I ducked and ran towards them. I heard a bowstring and an arrow hit him in the chest. Gerin and Sten drew their swords but I darted to my left and kept running, hearing movement all around us, whoops of what must have been bandits of some sort. Risking a glance around at the twenty or so that rushed the three of them, I saw I was not being chased so I shouted for Nielus and Petir, screamed to burst. I had got within a few yards of camp before slipping on the loose stones from the cliffs and boulders around us. Petir caught me while the others drained brews.

  “Where? How many?” demanded Nielus. I pointed back up the path where the sound of swords and shouting carried faintly, told him how many. No sooner had Petir put me back on my feet Nielus threw a shortsword at him.

  “You bragged about your swordmaster and the training you had. Time to
put it to use, boy.”

  “You can’t leave!” I shouted.

  “He can and he will. Get a brew down you, boy and stay close.”

  Petir’s eyes filled. He looked around us. “There, a dell, see those bushes down off the track? Get some food, water and blankets and get down there, I’ll whistle something from Ramban when we get back. Go!” I rushed to kiss him. He quivered, terrified, before Nielus dragged him away. I wouldn’t see him for the next twelve winters.

  I took what I could from the camp, some flasks, a knife and a saddlebag of bilt and bisks. A short while later I heard cheering, then the camp being pillaged for the horses and supplies. I fell asleep under a woollen blanket at some point that night, told myself stories in my head to stop myself from thinking of him dead and crying and so alerting the raiders to my position.

  I woke up to a heavy mist and silence. The bush I was in shivered with my withdrawal, flecks of ice falling like shingle through the twigs. I wanted to know if he was alive or dead, that the last I saw of him would or wouldn’t be that last panicked farewell. I had never felt more the younger sister, the little princess.

  I was too scared to head back up the slopes to where we were ambushed, to find out if the raiders were there, for I knew what they would want, the more and worse perhaps than Nielus’s men. Petir had bade me get away and hide. If he was alive, he might forgive me. It was the middle of the day before I carried on along the frozen path and slowly down towards the foothills of Donag’s Boot and the plains of Jua beyond.

  I became feverish the next day and despite the air clearing to a drier cold as I got into the foothills and woods of the Juan border I made little progress. I grew terrified of every sound, desperate to find someone to help me and fearful of what they would do to me. The fever grew, magnifying my terror, and I begged for my life to all the magists I had learned of from my tutors until the vivid beating life around me became a clamouring, then an agony in my ears that I could not stand straight from, that made me sick over and over. I retched up what little water I dared try and take until I fell in and out of dark accusatory dreams, filled with fetching and fantastic figures that made a puppet of me until I could bear no more.