The Wyrdborn took no notice. Instead, he jigged the baby up and down, trying to elicit a smile from his solemn little face. ‘Watch now, Lucien. There’ll soon be more blood. You won’t cry this time, will you?’
‘I beg you, my lord. Don’t open the gate,’ cried Deiton.
‘All men live and die at our whim. Mercy is only for those who serve our purpose. That is a lesson I want this boy to learn.’
The gate swung open to reveal two hounds far larger than any Deiton had ever seen before. It took a moment for the creatures to understand they were free from their cage and to lumber out into the arena. Deiton felt his knees go weak. The beasts were taller than he was at the shoulder, and their teeth were the length of his abandoned dagger. He would have done better to die quickly, by the sword, in the way he’d dispatched the dead man at his feet.
Looking closer, he found something odd about the creatures’ faces. Their eyelids stayed closed in a strange manner that made him think there were no eyeballs beneath them.
Deiton looked up, ready to beg for his life one last time, but when he saw the glee in the Wyrdborn’s face he knew it was pointless. He took hold of his sword, still buried in the chest of the man he’d killed, and tugged it free. It wouldn’t protect him for more than a moment, but he wasn’t the coward that fiend had called him. He would fight to the end, with a weapon in his hand. How could he do such a thing to a baby, how could he make him watch such horror?
The image Deiton would take into death was the sight of that baby, his eyes drawn to the dogs and the rest of his face without emotion.
13
Departure
‘Silvermay! Silvermay, I have a job for you.’
I stifled a groan from deep in my throat. Birdie had been working me like a slave since I’d returned to Haywode. I swear I heard those words cawed by the birds overhead; they even echoed in my dreams.
‘I’m here,’ I called from the drying shed, where she’d sent me to stack turnips so the air could flow between them. Somehow I resisted the urge to add, What do you want this time?
We met halfway between the shed and the house, me with a face like thunder, I’m sure, and my mother carrying a basket.
‘Your father sent Piet to collect firewood in the forest. He won’t get any lunch unless someone takes him some, so here …’ She plonked the basket into my arms. ‘Wait while he eats, and if there are any mushrooms about bring them back in the basket. A few would be better than none.’
This wasn’t a job, it was a treat; and if joining Tamlyn for lunch wasn’t enough, I could hang around pretending to pick mushrooms, and as long as I brought back a few it wouldn’t look like I’d been slacking. I nearly kissed her, but that would have given the game away.
Tamlyn and I needed to talk. When we were sitting side by side on a fallen trunk, I told him straight out what was on my mind.
‘You scared me yesterday at the forge, when Ryall and I were having a perfectly innocent hug. We were only celebrating his mechanical arm, after all the work we’d put into it.’
‘Yes, I know that’s all it was.’
‘Then why did you look ready to kill us both? You mean more to me than a hundred Ryalls, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give a friend a hug when something wonderful happens.’
‘It was seeing your arms around him, Silvermay. It didn’t matter what the truth was, something flared in me, something I couldn’t keep down the way I used to. It’s been difficult these last few days.’
‘Since Miston came with the news.’
‘Yes,’ he murmured unhappily.
And why shouldn’t he be unhappy when the news was of his mother’s death? But that wasn’t what he was talking about and I knew it.
‘It’s the Wyrdborn in you.’
‘Yes,’ he said again, although this time without misery.
I didn’t miss the difference and shuddered. ‘It’s become stronger in you since you heard about … about what happened in Vonne.’
‘No, Silvermay, the Wyrdborn in me stays the same, neither stronger nor weaker. What has changed is my will to fight it.’
‘I want to help you,’ I said, placing my hand on his arm. ‘I can help you, like your mother did, and part of that is letting me share your grief about her death. That’s the commonfolk way, the way you have to learn.’
We hadn’t been so close since the night in the stable when he’d decorated my hair with stalks of straw. He had welcomed our intimacy then, his body warm and soft to my touch. It was the same flesh that I touched now, my hand on his forearm, yet he seemed so hard, unyielding. No taller, no heavier than my father perhaps, but this was the body that had destroyed entire trees in its anguish. But I knew that if I loved him, then I must accept both parts of him and trust him to bring the two of them together for me.
‘You have a generous spirit, Silvermay. You give part of yourself to Ryall, to Hespa, to anyone who needs you, and especially to me, even when you know what I am. That takes courage. I wish I had the same in me.’
‘You do, Tamlyn. You wouldn’t have helped Nerigold and Lucien the way you did if it wasn’t there, inside you. You’d have given up on me, too.’
‘I don’t ever want to give up on you, but I’m afraid. I can feel myself being drawn back to my father’s ways. If it wasn’t for you, tugging just as hard the other way, I would have given in.’
There was only so much a hand on the arm could do. I reached up and cupped his head into my palm, drawing him down to me to whisper into his ear. ‘I trust you. I wouldn’t have waited on the jetty in Greystone if that trust wasn’t set hard in my bones. Ezeldi trusted you, too. Don’t you think it’s strange that it’s her murder that is tearing you up like this? She wouldn’t have wanted it this way.’
He broke away from my tender hold. ‘I don’t know about that, Silvermay. She wouldn’t want her murder to go unavenged. She wasn’t that forgiving, believe me. She wasn’t so different from other Wyrdborn, either, in many ways. That’s why she sent Master Dessar with the silver ring.’
He took it from his pocket, where I was sure it had remained ever since Miston had handed it over. In the dull light of the forest it didn’t seem the least bit remarkable — no markings, no magical symbols, just that square heaviness that I found rather ugly.
He seemed to know what I was thinking. ‘It’s not much of a gift, is it, especially when it comes from the grave. But you don’t know what it means, Silvermay. My mother stole this ring from my father — last month? Last year? Who knows when? What I do know is what she wanted me to do with it.’
He wouldn’t tell me any more; and after a bittersweet hour together while I made a half-hearted attempt to find mushrooms, I was on my way back to the village.
In the days that followed, Tamlyn returned to the forge in every spare moment my father allowed him. With Mr Stenglass as his teacher and assistant, he made moulds and added the delicate work to decorate the sword, with symbols of good luck, I thought. I was wrong.
When finally Tamlyn unveiled the new weapon in Mr Nettlefield’s tavern, a shimmering veneer of silver was riveted to the tip of the blade. The rest of the village marvelled at it — even Ossin, who knew more about weapons than most — yet none of them guessed where the silver had come from. Tamlyn had the weapon he needed. With Coyle’s ring melted down to form the sword’s tip, no Wyrdborn magic would protect him if Tamlyn plunged the blade into his heart. Lady Ezeldi would be avenged, and my love would stand with the killer’s blood on his hands — a killer himself.
‘It’s time I left Haywode,’ Tamlyn announced when he’d finished the tankard of ale Mr Stenglass had bought him to mark the occasion. The men who’d gathered to share in the ale and marvel at the new sword didn’t take any notice, but my father did.
‘I thought as much,’ he said, making sure only Tamlyn and I heard him. ‘A man doesn’t craft a weapon like that, then put it away beneath his bed.’ He nodded at Tamlyn. ‘A good worker shouldn’t go off empty-handed. You’ll have wh
atever our family can spare.’
Why should I have been surprised that my father was suddenly smiling? He saw only danger in Tamlyn’s presence and that was enough to want him gone. He was practically shoving him out the door.
‘Yes, it’s time, and I’m coming with you,’ said Ryall, who had come with us to Nettlefield’s.
‘And me,’ I announced. I had waited weeks for a chance to get Lucien back in my care.
But when we returned home to tell Birdie the news, my father had some of his own. ‘You can’t go with them, Silvermay. You are my daughter … our daughter,’ he corrected himself quickly when Birdie frowned at him. ‘We want you here with us, where you’ll be safe and a good future lies ahead for you.’
He meant the life of my sisters — marriage, babies and the steady grind of the farming wife that seemed to make most people happy. Not so long ago I had looked forward to that life, but now I had a pledge to fulfil.
We argued, then — oh, how we argued. I shouted, I raged around the cottage, but my father wouldn’t budge. Tamlyn left us to it; Ryall, too. Even Birdie disappeared, which surprised me because she wasn’t one to let others fight their battles alone.
Finally, my father took my hand. ‘My darling, there is one thing in all of this that you haven’t considered. You are drawn towards a Wyrdborn who has the power to play with a girl’s emotions —’
‘I know that,’ I snapped. ‘And I’ve told you, Tamlyn is different.’
He put up his other hand to stop my tirade and said with infuriating patience, ‘Tamlyn, yes, I’ll grant you that. But there is another Wyrdborn in all of this, one who might be toying with your heart in ways you haven’t considered.’
‘Coyle?’ I said, surprised. ‘I hate him with every drop of my blood. How can he hold sway over my feelings?’
‘Not Coyle, either. Think about it, Silvermay. Who has made you his servant since the day he was brought to this village?’
My father’s hints made no sense at first. I was no one’s servant except Lucien’s, maybe, and … That was as far as my thinking ventured before I stared at Ossin, unable to speak.
‘Yes, I see you’ve guessed. Tamlyn has told me of the mosaics and the fears you both have for the boy. I fear for the kingdom, if it all comes to pass. That baby may grow into the worst Wyrdborn ever born, Silvermay, and what’s to say he hasn’t practised his magic on you from the beginning? You seem to love him as if he were your own.’
‘Is it wrong to love a child, especially one left without his mother?’
‘It is if foul magic has forced you to it. It’s not Tamlyn’s spells that I’m afraid of, Silvermay, it’s Lucien’s.’
‘You’re wrong,’ I said in a tone that would have scared the fiercest dragon. ‘There is no magic in what I feel for him.’
But it was clear my father didn’t believe it, and just as clear that he wouldn’t let me go with Tamlyn no matter how I begged and argued. He was caught up in a love of his own, a father’s love for his daughter, and as angry as he’d made me, I couldn’t blame him for that.
To my dismay, Tamlyn had been busy while I tried in vain to change Ossin’s mind. By the time I emerged, exhausted, from our cottage, he had gathered the few things he planned to take with him, including a sack Birdie had loaded with supplies from the drying shed, and he was ready to leave. All Ryall seemed to be taking was his new arm, no longer a contraption, but a part of him he learned to control better every day.
‘It’s best this way,’ said Tamlyn when he embraced me in the brotherly fashion that was all he could manage in front of my parents. ‘It won’t be easy getting Lucien back from …’ He didn’t trust himself to say any more with so many ears close by.
‘What will you do once you’ve freed him?’
He stood back without offering an answer, and I could see in his face that he didn’t have one. It was that look, more than the new sword on his belt, that told me it wasn’t Lucien who was drawing him to Vonne.
Then it was Ryall’s turn, and blow me down if he didn’t wink at me after the briefest of hugs. The rat — I could have strangled him. How could he go off so happily without me?
If I didn’t make a fuss about being left behind, it was because I had already decided that they weren’t going without me.
The hardest part was moping about the house for the rest of the day, pretending to be heartbroken, while secretly collecting the things I needed to take with me. I couldn’t afford to let my parents guess what I was up to. In the end, I thought it better to head off into the darkness with little more than the clothes on my back than risk giving my plan away.
It was almost as hard to wait until the house was quiet after supper. In a stroke of good luck, my father had barely emptied his plate before he was stretching and yawning, and soon after the cottage rattled with his snores. Unfortunately, my mother seemed determined to catch up on all the little darning jobs she’d been putting off and she was still gathering things up and fussing about after I’d slipped behind my curtain.
I must have slept a little because I didn’t hear her go to bed, but finally the moment came — the house was still, the village asleep and the only eyes to watch me slip away would be the stars. I sat up, fully clothed, took my shawl from where I’d laid it close by and crept outside so quietly it would have made a mouse proud.
‘Ah, you’ve appeared at last, Silvermay. I was beginning to wonder if I’d guessed wrong,’ said a voice when I was no more than three steps from the door.
It was my mother, sitting in a chair next to the cottage, with a blanket over her to keep away the autumn chill.
‘I … er … I couldn’t sleep. I’ve come out for some air.’
‘No, you haven’t. You’re running off to join the other two.’
She wasn’t making any effort to keep her voice down. I checked over my shoulder, expecting Ossin to appear in the doorway at any moment.
Birdie said, ‘Your father won’t disturb us. I put a sleeping potion in his supper.’
‘You what?’
‘Oh, don’t sound so shocked. Surely you don’t want him to catch you.’
‘No,’ I muttered, confused, ‘but …’
But what? I couldn’t work out what was going on here.
‘I see you’ve got nothing with you,’ said my mother, looking pointedly at my empty hands. ‘Just as well I packed a few things.’ She stood up, lifted a sack from the other side of her chair and dumped it in my arms. ‘I managed to get all the soot out of your yellow dress. In that, you won’t look so much like a peasant girl on the streets of Vonne.’
‘You mean you’re not going to stop me?’
‘No, and I’ll make sure Ossin doesn’t come after you tomorrow, either. You didn’t think of that, did you? It’s obvious where those two are off to, and if he found you gone as well, he’d fetch you back before lunchtime. He loves you, Silvermay, and he’s afraid Piet will make you unhappy.’
‘But he will find me gone. How will you stop him from coming after me?’
‘I’ll tell him that you won’t be happy with anyone else and so you must take your chances, just as I did with him twenty-five years ago.’
I was grateful for the faith my mother was showing in me, but would she stick by me when Ossin told her the rest of what he knew?
‘His name isn’t Piet, it’s Tamlyn.’
Birdie gave a little snort and, despite the darkness, I was sure she was smiling. ‘That explains why you’ve called out that name in your sleep more than once.’
‘Have I? I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. There’s more,’ I added, dreading the words I had to speak. ‘He’s one of the Wyrdborn.’
There would be no smiles now, yet, after a few moments, she stunned me a second time. ‘I’d guessed as much. There had to be some reason your father was riding him so hard; and there was a look in his eyes from time to time that chilled my blood, especially after the news about his mother.’
‘Aren’t you afraid for what it means
… if I go after him? It’s not just for now. I want to be with him always.’
‘That’s something else that’s been plain to see ever since you returned. Yes, Silvermay, of course I’m worried. Things can end badly for girls who love the Wyrdborn. I don’t want that fate for you. But I’m helping you because no ordinary Wyrdborn would let Ossin treat him like a slave, or be so gentle with you. I’ve seen it, even when you haven’t. He looks at you as a man should when he’s in love. There’s no spell between the two of you, except the one you’ve cast over him. He may be angry about his mother, and his new sword has become an obsession that will bring trouble, most likely — there’s peril ahead for you both — but the choice is yours.’
And I’d made it long ago.
The hug we shared then was more than a simple farewell. We’d never held each other so close in all my sixteen years. There had been times I’d thought Birdie saw no deeper than my skin, or didn’t love me in the way other mothers in Haywode doted on their daughters. But I was the luckiest of them all, and instead of leaving Haywode without a glance over my shoulder, as I’d intended, I stopped twice to wave to the dark figure who watched along the road until I was out of sight.
When I’d walked no more than a mile, Ryall called to me from among the trees.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked him.
‘Waiting for you, of course.’
At least I knew now why the teasing scoundrel had winked at me.
‘Is there anyone who doesn’t know what I’m going to do before I do it myself?’
Ryall laughed as he fell into step beside me. Then he said something that brought me back to earth.
‘Tamlyn, maybe. He looked surprised when I said we should wait for you. He’s barely said a word since we left this afternoon. All he does is run his hands over his new sword.’
Father had told me often about Vonne, but no matter how well his words painted a picture, they were no match for the sight itself. I am getting ahead of myself, though. Before that first glimpse came three days of walking through farmland that seemed familiar even though I had never been that way before. Farmers’ fields look the same everywhere, I suppose, and so did the woods that swallowed the road from time to time.
Tamlyn Page 13
