Cold Fury: King's Convicts III

by Gail Z. Martin

  “You’ve all had quite an adventure out there,” one of the colonists said. He dropped his voice, mindful that some of Prokief’s men were aboard the ships that did not founder. “Pox take the idiot that sent you out in this weather. We knew storms were coming.”

  “There’s soup and bread to help you warm up.” One of the female colonists, a plump woman in her middle years, gestured toward a large cauldron and a table piled with loaves. “Best we could do on short notice.”

  Blaine was painfully aware of how shabby he and the other convicts must look, clothes dirty and sodden, unwashed, unshaven, and hair matted. He expected the colonists to shy away from them, and was astounded that the Bay-town residents had bothered to turn out to see them come ashore, let alone welcome them with fire and food.

  The man who had greeted them seemed to guess Blaine’s thoughts. “We’ve all been convicts, you know,” he said with a wry smile. “It’s not the kind of thing you forget.”

  Blaine was shivering so hard it took more than one try to get the cup of soup to his lips. “Thank you,” he managed.

  The tall man watched him with a distant look in his eyes. “Fishing this time of year is a fool’s errand,” he replied. “Our men won’t go out once the icebergs get bad. You can see why.”

  Blaine nodded. “So it’s true?” he said, glancing around the warehouse. “Some convicts make it out alive?”

  The man chuckled. “Yes,” he replied. “It’s true. In fact, don’t let Prokief lie to you. If you survive three years in Velant, it’s the king’s law that you be released to the colony. If you survive.” He paused. “I’m Ifrem, owner of the Crooked House—the best damn tavern in Bay-town.”

  “Quit yer braggin’,” another colonist bantered. “It’s the only damn tavern in Bay-town.”

  “That, too,” Ifrem admitted with a grin. “Not exactly the Rooster and Pig, but not too far off the mark.” Everyone knew the Rooster and Pig, a garishly painted tavern on the waterfront in Castle Reach, the main harbor city back in Donderath. The Rooster and Pig was famed far and wide for its bitterbeer. Even King Merrill sent servants to fetch its beer, while sailors spread the tavern’s fame far and wide.

  “I’d give a lot for some of that bitterbeer right now,” Blaine replied, wishing he could stop shivering so that his voice no longer trembled with the cold.

  “We brought ale as well as soup, but we figured you should eat something first, warm up a little,” Ifrem said. He watched Blaine sip the soup as if it were elixir. “How long until you earn your Ticket?”

  “Six months,” Blaine managed. “If I live that long.”

  Ifrem did not take his comment as humor. “Be careful,” he advised, dropping his voice. “The commander doesn’t let go of his prisoners easily. Especially if you’ve drawn his ire.”

  “If we hadn’t before, we will now, coming home one boat—and all that herring—short,” Piran said. He had begun to get his color back and managed not to look half frozen despite his bald head. “And I suspect we’re not on his list of favorites to begin with.”

  That, Blaine knew, was putting it mildly. He and Piran had managed to be a thorn in Prokief’s side for the entire span of their internment, and had the scars to prove it. Piran’s mouth caused a good bit of trouble, but Blaine and Piran had also surfaced as unlikely leaders who had earned a reputation among the prisoners for challenging the most brutish of Prokief’s underlings.

  “We’ll go out when the sun hits the horizon and bring in whatever barrels we can find,” Ifrem said. “Some of them should be floating out there, if the current doesn’t take them. We’ll send them up to the prison. That might ease things a bit, if the boat’s load wasn’t a total loss.”

  “Some of our men drowned,” Blaine said. “It was bad out there.”

  Ifrem nodded. “I’m not keen on fishing, but I’ve had my turn out there when we needed all hands to provision for winter. It’s a dangerous business. Those rafts were a smart idea. A man doesn’t last long in the water, cold as it is.”

  Blaine could feel the soup warming him, and his fingers and toes ached as sensation returned. He was punchy from the adrenaline and exhausted from the long shifts aboard the boat, but tired as he was, one question was uppermost in his mind. “What news do you have from home?”

  “Before I answer that, I’ll get you some ale,” Ifrem offered. “Sit down before you fall down.”

  They sat. All around them, the convicts huddled around the fire barrels, gratefully eating the food the colonists provided. Blaine heard some of Prokief’s overseers arguing with the boat captains, trying to rush getting the prisoners back to Velant. The captains were colonists, and disinclined to give in to the overseers after being forced to stay out longer than prudence dictated, at the risk of their ships. At the moment, both sides appeared to be at a standoff.

  Ifrem returned with the ale, which Piran and Blaine accepted thankfully. He sat down across from them. “We don’t hear as much as we’d like,” Ifrem said. “The ships only come every three months. Getting a message delivered costs coin to bribe the sailors, and sometimes coin to get them to release a letter someone already paid to send up here,” he added, his face twisting in annoyance.

  “But you get some news?” Blaine pressed. “Some letters?”

  Ifrem nodded. “Yes. Prokief allows very little mail into or out of the prison—it’s part of how he keeps you under his thumb,” he said quietly, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the overseers were out of earshot. “But out here, we get news from the sailors and some news from our families—at least, those that want to acknowledge we’re still alive.”

  Blaine had heard little from his Aunt Judith or his sister Mari since his exile. After the first year, the letters stopped coming altogether. He had tried to reassure himself that they had not completely forgotten him or disavowed him, but as the years passed without word, it was difficult to keep believing. After all this time, if I could get a letter to them, should I do it? Maybe it’s better to let the dead stay dead.

  “The news isn’t good, unfortunately,” Ifrem continued. “The border skirmishes with Meroven have been going on for a while, but it’s escalating. The border areas are battlefields, there’s talk that the army might start taking conscripts, and the longer the fighting goes on, the more of a burden falls on everyone.”

  Meroven was the kingdom to the north of Donderath, a proud land with a long history of bad blood and broken treaties with its neighbor to the south. “Are we winning?” Piran asked, leaning forward, his soldier’s instincts at the fore.

  Ifrem swore. “Meroven’s king is a madman. He’s reckless, land-hungry.”

  “But are we winning?” Piran pressed.

  Ifrem sighed. “It depends on whose letters you believe,” he replied. “I’m sorry—you’ve been without news for so long, and now I can’t offer you good tidings.” He looked at Piran and seemed to size him up.

  “You fought?” Ifrem asked.

  Piran nodded curtly. “A while ago.”

  “Count yourself lucky you’re not back in Donderath,” Ifrem said. “The first letters we received were nervous about the fighting, but confident it would be over soon, and in Donderath’s favor. Lately, that’s changed.”

  “Do you know why?” Piran’s tone had an unusual urgency to it. Blaine wondered how many of Piran’s friends still fought under the king’s colors, facing the Meroven threat on the battlefront.

  “Anything we hear is third-hand, at best,” Ifrem replied. “It’s not a sea war, so the sailors don’t know anything. We get the gossip that makes its way to Castle Reach, after it’s been passed through who-knows-how-many tale-tellers. Some things might grow with the telling. But I don’t think they’re exaggerating the odds. No one’s winning, and it’s been dragging on a long time.”

  “What about the Cross-Sea Kingdoms?” Piran asked, hungry for details. “Or the Lesser Kingdoms to the south?”

  Ifrem shrugged. “I wish I could tell you, but we’re not he
aring from the soldiers themselves. Just what reaches their mothers, sisters, and wives. I don’t know anything else.”

  Piran nodded. “It’s more than we knew before. Thank you.” Piran was rarely reflective, but he had a pensiveness to him Blaine suspected had more to do with the news of the war than their near brush with death.

  There were so many questions Blaine longed to ask about the colony, now that leaving Velant was almost a reality. “How does it work, when convicts are released?” he asked, pleased that his voice no longer shook with the cold.

  Ifrem stole another look over his shoulder. The dispute between the guards and the ships’ captains had grown louder. Blaine wondered how far the captains would push their luck, since Prokief was the colony’s governor as well as commander of the prison garrison.

  “You walk out of the prison with your papers and your coin and the clothes on your backs,” Ifrem said. “We usually know when to expect a new group. The colony has a governing body, a Council of Citizens. We try to assign each new colonist a guide, someone to help you make the change. There’s a lottery for land parcels. When you build your house and barns, we get a group together to make the work go faster. Same with planting and harvest.”

  A note of pride colored Ifrem’s voice. “We watch each other’s backs, for the most part,” he said. “More than back home, that’s for sure. If there’s hunting or fishing to be done, we all pitch in. More hands make for less work.”

  Blaine had another question on the tip of his tongue when the shouting started.

  “Our orders were to bring them back immediately,” one of the overseers argued, his voice pitched to be heard above the buzz of conversation. It was clear that the overseers were out of patience. Or perhaps, they’re as afraid of Prokief as the prisoners are, Blaine thought.

  “Let them finish eating,” the plump woman cajoled. “We have food enough for you, too.”

  Blaine wondered if it galled the colonists to extend their hospitality to the overseers. Surely they too had experienced the casual cruelties of Prokief and his guards when they served their time in Velant. Yet there was no undercurrent of bitterness in the woman’s voice. The overseers were just as miserable as their sodden charges tonight.

  Reluctantly, the overseers accepted rations of soup and bread now that all the convicts had been fed. “Lady, you don’t understand,” one of the overseers said. “If we don’t get them back soon, the Commander will send the warden-mages.”

  The room went silent. Everyone turned to look at the overseers. “We’re overdue,” one of the guards said, regaining his bluster. “They might be on their way now.”

  There was no mistaking the fear in the eyes of the colonists. It mirrored the terror of the convicts. Prokief’s warden-mages were a law unto themselves, brutal and sadistic. That the guards also feared them was a measure of how much power they wielded.

  “Of course,” the woman said, seeming to shrink in on herself. “You’ve got to get back. We didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”

  “You’d better go,” Ifrem said, standing, indicating that Blaine and Piran should do the same. “If the gods are with you, we’ll see you here soon.”

  Blaine and Piran set their cups aside, murmuring their thanks. After all of the colonists’ generosity, they had no desire to bring hardship on them. A scuffle outside made Blaine wonder if it was already too late.

  A gust of frigid wind swept through the warehouse as a dozen Velant guards burst through the door. They had their swords in hand, and looked as if they welcomed a fight. The colonists and prisoners stepped back, hands raised. They had more than enough experience with Prokief’s guards to know how volatile the soldiers were, and how much latitude they had in meting out punishment. Even the overseers looked frightened, and Blaine wondered whether Prokief would weigh the loss of a ship and its herring as more grievous than their disobedience in not returning immediately to the prison. Prokief’s not likely to pay much attention to extenuating circumstances, Blaine thought.

  “There’s no need for a fight,” Ifrem said, moving to the fore. The soldiers said nothing, and stopped in a line along one side of the warehouse. A man dressed in the gray robes of a warden-mage strode through the. The room fell silent.

  “Commander Prokief does not take kindly to disobedience,” the warden-mage warned with a glance toward the overseers. He raised his hands and intoned a chant. The overseers fell to their knees, arms clutched around their bellies, doubled over in agony. Blaine and Piran exchanged a nervous glance. That particular malicious spell seemed to be a favorite among the warden-mages given how often they employed it for even trivial infractions. Prokief’s warden mages were masters at inflicting pain without doing permanent damage, thereby denying the respite of shock and death. Blaine and Piran had both been on the receiving end of the warden-mages’s cruelty, and the memory of the searing pain still haunted Blaine’s dreams. He felt his gut clench as he watched the overseers topple to the floor.

  “Explain,” the warden-mage snapped, glaring at the colonists.

  Ifrem paled, but he held his ground. “One of the fishing boats was struck by an iceberg,” he said, his voice calm and measured. “The storm almost swamped the other boats. All the men nearly drowned.” He glanced toward the disheveled prisoners.

  “They were half-dead from exposure. If we hadn’t brought them in to warm them, you would have lost many of them by the time they reached the prison.” Although Ifrem’s voice was carefully neutral, there was a hint of challenge in his eyes as he lifted his chin and met the warden-mage’s gaze. “Surely the Commander desires live workers to meet your quotas.”

  Clever, Blaine thought. Remind the warden-mage that the king expects his due, and it’ll be that much harder to deliver the more of us Prokief kills for spite.

  The warden-mage barely glanced at the tortured overseers, but he made a gesture with his right hand, and the spell lifted, leaving the overseers lying spent and gasping on the floor. The guards hauled the men roughly to their feet, though a few of them looked like they might pass out from their ordeal.

  “Rowse! McFadden! Is this true?” The warden-mage’s gaze fell on Blaine and Piran. He wasn’t the lead mage, Ejnar, but he had inflicted punishment more than once at Prokief’s command when Blaine and Piran had managed to draw the commander’s ire. It was not a good thing that he recognized them, and Blaine saw concern—and curiosity—in Ifrem’s gaze.

  “Exactly as he said, sir,” Blaine responded, managing to keep the bitterness out of ‘sir’. “We were on the water in the worst of the storm, in the dark, and the icebergs broke our hull. Only half the crew made it to shore. Our overseer, Carson, died in the wreck.”

  “The colonists saved us, which wouldn’t have been necessary if those bloody overseers hadn’t kept us out in a storm past full dark,” Piran snapped. Blaine repressed a sigh. Piran never could leave well-enough alone.

  A wave of the mage’s hand sent Piran across the room to slam into the warehouse wall. “I do not like your tone,” the mage observed. Piran rose and shook himself off. His lip was bloodied. For once, he kept his comments to himself, though his gaze was murderous.

  The mage’s eyes narrowed and he turned back to the overseers, who shrank back in fear. “Interesting,” he said, stretching out the word as if pondering each syllable. “The commander will not be pleased that your bad judgment cost a ship, its load, and several prisoners. We will discuss this when we return to the prison. The commander will want to know.”

  Perhaps Blaine should have felt satisfaction in the fear he saw in the overseers’ eyes after the harsh treatment they had received at Carson’s hand. Earlier in his imprisonment, he might have been inclined to gloat silently. Now, he knew that whatever punishments the overseers endured—however well deserved—would just result in even worse conditions for the prisoners.

  The warden-mage looked to Ifrem and the colonists. “I will let Commander Prokief know that you intervened to reduce the loss of his assets. He may reim
burse you your supplies.” His voice turned cold. “You also violated the prohibition of fraternization with the prisoners. Commander Prokief may refuse your reimbursement as punishment for disobeying the rules. Until he makes his decision, I am placing a tenth-bell curfew on all colonists within the sound of the Bay-town bell tower, effective immediately. Those who violate the curfew will be held accountable.”

  By the set of Ifrem’s jaw, Blaine could see that the punishment rankled, but Ifrem ducked his head and nodded. “Understood.” The tension among the colonists unmistakable, and Blaine wondered what hardships the curfew would cause them and whether they anticipated having their good deeds incur the wrath of Prokief and his lackeys. Ifrem sensed Blaine’s gaze and caught his eye, and gave a brief shake of his head. They knew, and they came anyway.

  “All of you—in the wagons!” the warden-mage ordered.

  The prisoners fell in line, reluctantly leaving the warmth and welcome of the warehouse. There was no mistaking the hatred in their eyes for the warden-mages, yet they all knew that there was no chance to go against Prokief’s word. But if the time ever comes that Prokief and his mages are vulnerable, watch out, Blaine thought.

  The convicts kept their heads down, queuing up for the wagons. Outside, it was bitter cold, and their canvas coats from the ships were still wet and of little use shielding them from the cold.

  “Rowse!” the mage said as Blaine and Piran moved to climb into the wagon. “As punishment for your insubordination, you and your friend will walk.” His lips quirked in a hint of a vengeful smile. “If prudence won’t shut your mouth, perhaps when your folly inconveniences your friends sufficiently, they’ll impress on you the need for discretion.”