by Alex Stewart
In return, he learned a lot about life on the river; how to tie knots he’d never heard of, even living in a maritime city, how to handle tiller and sails, and how to spot the minute ripples on the water which indicated where the best wind could be found. At times, he even lost sight of the reason for his journey for a moment or two, before recalling himself to business with a silent admonition of his own carelessness. His life was still in danger, and would be until he found and challenged his quarry.
Some nights along the way they simply tied up to the bank, driving steel spikes deep into the ground to take the mooring lines, eating the fish he caught or foraging along the banks while the daylight lasted. Greel seemed to have a particular knack for finding herbs and setting snares, and Drago was surprised to discover how prominently rabbit featured in a riverboat crew’s diet. Other nights were spent in riverside settlements like Naught’s Landing. In some of these, Clearspring seemed as uneasy as she had been in the first village they’d stopped at, while in others she seemed affable and relaxed; it didn’t take Drago long to realize that the better her mood, the lower the likelihood of meeting other elves while she was ashore.
The farther upriver they progressed, the less comfortable she seemed to become at the prospect of leaving the boat once they’d put in at a settlement, even electing on a couple of occasions to remain aboard for the night while Greel went in search of a drink, Drago of any information he could find, and Hannie of whichever young man of the village she was currently taking an interest in.
“She’s always like this when we get near the Marches,” Hannie confided one afternoon, coiling ropes, while Drago trailed the fishing line astern.
Drago pricked up his ears. “We’re close to them, then?” he asked, trying to make the enquiry sound casual.
Hannie nodded. “Two more days, we’ll be there. Then you’ll need to decide where you want to get off.”
Drago shrugged. “Close to the mines, I guess. Is there a wharf in the Barrens?”
Hannie laughed, Greel joining in from the tiller. “Not much point. They’re inland.” She pointed. “Just over the trees there, you see?”
Drago squinted. A line of hills rose out of the forest a long way ahead, hanging over them like a low, threatening thundercloud, their outlines blurred by distance. “Just about.”
“But there’s a wharf a little way inside the border of the Marches,” Hannie said, “where they offload supplies for the mines, and take on the gold. We could always drop you there.”
Greel nodded agreement. “There’s a road, they tell me, if you’re willing to risk using it. Gorash doesn’t raid every convoy passing along it.”
“Least he didn’t the last time we heard,” Hannie added.
Drago thought about that. If he presented himself as a miner looking for work, he might be able to slip in among a crowd of other people, and bide his time until he got a firm lead on the bandit’s whereabouts. If he was really lucky the reivers would attack the group he was traveling with, and he could follow them back to their camp when they withdrew. “Where are we putting in tonight?” he asked.
“Birch Glade,” Hannie said. “Skipper’s not keen, but we picked up some letters for there on the way upstream, so we don’t have a choice. Nice little town, if you ignore the pointears who think the rest of us are talking livestock.”
“Sounds delightful,” Drago said. “I can’t wait.”
In the event, Drago was pleasantly surprised. Birch Glade turned out to be a real town, at least by the standards of the riverbank, rather than the village he’d envisaged, with a tangle of wooden wharves reaching out into the waterway like a miniature model of one of the Fairhaven docks. Over a dozen boats were tied up there, and even before it came into sight, homes and warehouses were visible sprawling out along the bank for almost a mile. At first they were mostly farmsteads, carved out of the forest, then lumber mills and denser housing took over. Thousands of trees must have been felled to create a clearing large enough to encompass the town, and it was clearly growing bigger by the day. Drago had never seen or imagined anything like it, or stopped to wonder before where all the chairs and tables in Fairhaven had originally come from.
“Not the biggest,” Clearspring said, when he asked if this was the principal source of timber along the river, “but a major one. There are logging towns along the banks for the next couple of hundred miles, but most of them are smaller than this. Why do you ask?”
Drago shrugged. “Just wondering if we’re in the Marches yet.”
“No.” Clearspring shook her head. “We manage our woodlands more carefully than this. About the only thing Marchers do get right.” She swept an arm across the panorama, taking in the town, the bustling industry, and the scattering of logging camps and hamlets on the far bank. “The people here keep this up, and there won’t be anything worth felling in a generation or two.” Then she shrugged. “Not my problem, though. Maybe they’ll take up farming instead.”
“Maybe.” Drago found it hard to care either. “Do you call in here often?”
“If we have to,” Clearspring said. “There’s always timber to be hauled, and that’s a good earner, but there’s too many Marchers around for my liking. On the other hand, they’re not exactly in the majority, so that can be entertaining.”
Drago forbore from commenting. The implication wasn’t lost on him; many of the elves in Birch Glade would be exiles like Clearspring, washing up at the closest community to their homeland, and feelings would run high between the two groups. The local watchmen would more than earn their salaries, he was sure.
“Hannie tells me we’re only a couple of days from the mine wharf,” he said, and Clearspring nodded. “Could you stand to let me off there?”
Clearspring shrugged. “It’s your money. We’ll drop you wherever you like. Just don’t expect us to hang about afterwards.”
“Fair enough.” Drago watched as the town got closer, Greel leaning into the tiller to bring the boat in alongside the wharf. Men were already waiting there to grab the lines, moving with expert precision to haul the Rippling Light in alongside the quay, which seemed to Drago to be far more sophisticated in its construction than the one he’d seen at Naught’s Landing. The whole dock, in fact, was bustling, making him feel faintly nostalgic for his hometown; pretty much the only thing missing was the smell. “Do you have much to unload here?”
“Not really.” Clearspring waved away an enquiring shout from the operator of a hand-cranked derrick, who nodded, and swiveled his jib over to the cargo hatch of the boat in the neighboring berth instead. “Picked up a couple of mail pouches for here on our way upstream, or I’d just have kept going.” Drago nodded; it was an interesting novelty to be berthed somewhere with a few hours of daylight still to go. “Most of the stuff in the hold’s for the Delvings upstream, but we added a couple of crates of our own, with things we can always sell along the way. If I can get a good price for that here, and clear some space, we’ll fill it with offcuts from the lumber mills. People always want firewood, and in the bigger towns they can’t gather it for themselves.”
Which meant a lucrative second line of business for the boatyards in Fairhaven, Drago reflected. He’d once made good money keeping thieves from the offcuts, until he realized how desperate most of them were, and had found other contracts to fill his time with. Beating up beggars hadn’t sat well with him.
“Sounds like you’re going to be busy,” he said.
“I’m always busy,” Clearspring said. “What are you going to do?”
Drago shrugged. “Take a look around town, I guess.” And see if he could pick up any clues to Gorash’s whereabouts. A place this size, this close to the Marches, would probably be swirling with rumors. “And see about finding a drink. Know anywhere good?”
“One or two places,” Clearspring said. “Maybe I’ll show you if I get finished in time. But you’re paying.”
“I always do,” Drago said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“It’s what you do with it that counts.”
In the event, dusk was falling before Clearspring had finished transacting her business, and she and Drago went in search of the drink they’d discussed. Hannie had disappeared as usual, and Greel elected to remain behind on the boat to keep watch. The risk of pilferage was theoretically low, with so many people working on the docks with the boats in their eye line, but that only increased the chances that one of them might be less than honest—and everyone knew that “finding” the odd item that had been left lying around was a time-honored stevedore’s perk to which no one would object. No one local, anyway.
“So, what did you make of it?” Clearspring asked, as they made their way into the heart of the town. Drago had spent the intervening hours walking the streets, sampling various foodstuffs from itinerant vendors, and watching the people. He hadn’t seen more than a handful of other gnomes since boarding the riverboat, most of them travelers like himself, but the streets were full of humans, elves and goblins, who seemed to be getting along reasonably well with one another. The elves from the Marches were easy to pick out, by their tendency to cluster together and the contemptuous manner they adopted toward everyone else, but since nobody seemed to want to have any more to do with them than they could help, that didn’t seem to matter very much. Certainly there was no more tension in the air than there generally was in his hometown, and that was fueled by a myriad of rivalries between districts, guilds, businesses, street gangs, watch houses and families, irrespective of the species of anyone involved.
“Bit quiet,” Drago said, determined to seem as cosmopolitan as a Fairhavener ought to be anywhere less sophisticated, “but it seems nice enough.”
“Yes, it does,” Clearspring said, in the tone of someone who’d learned not to trust appearances a long time ago. She paused, to glance in the open window of a cobbler’s shop; unlike the hamlets they’d stopped at in their journey up the river, Birch Glade was large enough to support specialized tradesmen, and every street had at least one or two businesses interspersed among the houses. Not seeing anything there she liked or needed, she moved on. “Not far now.”
The tavern she’d been aiming for turned out to be on the next street, warm lamplight spilling from an open door, outside which a couple of patrons leaned, tankards in their hands. One human, one elf, both male, they watched Clearspring pass inside with obvious interest, and Drago with faint curiosity.
The by now familiar strains of “Reiver Bold” greeted them as they passed over the threshold, and Drago glanced around, finding to his surprise that a few of the elvish customers were joining in with the goblins and humans making up the bulk of the singers. Clearspring smiled and nodded to a couple of them, who returned the greeting and carried on singing with gusto.
“Didn’t expect to hear elves singing that one,” Drago said, rising on tiptoe to see over the bar. He’d been listening to versions of it at nearly every settlement they’d called at along the river, but almost always sung by goblins, and the occasional human.
“Didn’t you?” Clearspring smiled tightly. “We’re near the Marches now. I told you, not everyone likes the way things have been going there since the queen disappeared.” She caught the bartender’s eye. “Two ales. And the same for him.” She nodded downward, in case the goblin in the grubby apron pushing a lump of stain that might once have been a rag around the countertop had missed Drago’s presence. “He’s paying.”
“Of course he is,” Drago said, resigned, pulling the right change from his purse. He picked up his drinks, and followed the riverboat captain across the crowded taproom, sticking as close to her as he could without his intentions appearing dishonorable to avoid having to weave around innumerable bodies almost twice his own height. For a moment he was incongruously reminded of the unusually cold winter a couple of years before, when ice had formed in a couple of the more sheltered inner harbors, and he’d sat on the dock watching a departing ship cleaving a channel through the frozen water, her tender bobbing behind her at the end of a cable. “So what do you think happened to her?”
“Who?” She found a couple of seats at a nearby table, next to the singing elves, who’d moved on to another ballad by now. She began humming along with this one too. “’Tis fair to be a king, I trow, with all the king’s delights. With wine and lace and feather beds to share with catamites . . .”
“The queen.” He took a mouthful of the ale, which turned out to be surprisingly good. Another advantage of spending the night somewhere almost civilized. He kept his voice casual. “I got talking to someone who thought Gorash killed her.” Which was true, although the way he’d phrased it, Clearspring would no doubt assume it was someone he’d met exploring the town earlier that afternoon.
“Bollocks he did,” a goblin at the next table cut in, genuine anger suffusing his voice. “What are you, a Marcher he cut off at the knees?” His fists were clenching, and Drago shifted his weight, silently cursing his oversized chair. Jumping down from it and getting properly balanced would take an appreciable fraction of a second, by which time the goblin, with his feet already on the floor, would be standing and swinging at him. He tightened his grip on the tankard of ale. It’d be a shame to waste the first decent drink he’d had since leaving home, but throwing it in the goblin’s face would buy him enough time to take the initiative.
“Don’t mind him. He’s from the coast. Why would he know anything?” Clearspring said, leaning over to put one of the spare drinks on the other table in front of the goblin. Not hers, Drago noted. “Have this one on us.” She turned back to Drago. “Would this happen to have been a Marcher you were talking to?”
“He said that was where he was from,” Drago said truthfully. He had no reason to doubt Greenleaf’s veracity, on that score at least.
“There you are, then,” the goblin said, mollified by the unexpected acquisition of a free drink. “They’re all lying bastards.” He shot a quick glance at the elves around him. “The ones still living there, anyway. No offense.”
“None taken,” Clearspring assured him, “but if you want to get the next round in, that’d go down well as an apology.”
“Fair enough.” The goblin took an appreciative gulp, and turned to Drago. “Gorash was talking to her. First chance in a generation to get back what’s rightfully ours. Why would he do something as stupid as killing her? If you ask me, it was that pukebag Stargleam. Topped his own sister to grab the throne.”
But Clearspring was shaking her head dubiously. “Can’t see it myself. That ballad pretty well sums him up. He was more than happy to hang around the palace spending her money on trinkets, whores and pretty boys, but he never showed any sign of wanting to rule. Too much like hard work.”
“I agree.” The nearest elf joined in, with a nod of the head. “Look up ‘bone idle tosspot’ in the dictionary, and you’ll find his portrait. If he was going to have her killed it would have been over something that mattered to him, not the throne. Even his father did a better job, and he wasn’t exactly the sharpest sword in the arsenal.”
“Fair point.” The goblin drained his tankard. “You’d know better than me, being from up that way. Same again all round?” Everyone nodded, and he rose, intent on heading for the bar. Then he turned back on the point of leaving, struck by an afterthought. “Whoever did it, though, she’s definitely dead, right? Otherwise she’s bound to have come back by now, the pig’s breakfast he’s making of everything.” Then he disappeared into the crowd.
“You’d think so,” Clearspring said, but the elf shook his head, and leaned in confidentially across the tabletop.
“I heard she’s biding her time. Building an army to invade the Marches, and regain the kingdom.”
Clearspring snorted derisively. “Building an army where, exactly? I’ve been along every inch of this river, from the Delvings to the sea, and I’ve never seen a trace of one, or spoken to anyone who had.” She turned to Drago. “Unless your folk are hiding them in the caverns. Does that
sound likely to you?”
“Not unless she’s paying them a wagon load of rent,” Drago said, to general amusement. The gnomish homelands were known to keep themselves to themselves, unless there was something in it for them, which probably explained why so many of their scions did so well in places like Fairhaven. Even then, he couldn’t quite see it. For one thing, the queen’s putative army would be spending most of their time shuffling along gnome-sized tunnels bent almost double, and he didn’t think that would do much for their martial prowess.
“Maybe they’re in the Wastes, then, or overseas,” the elf persisted hopefully. “The Icelands, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” Drago said tactfully, although that sounded even less likely. An invasion or a coup d’état relied on the element of surprise, which would be somewhat lacking if the invading army needed weeks to get where it was going. The more he heard the more likely his original conclusion, that the missing queen was lying at the bottom of the river or in a hastily dug hole somewhere, with a stomach full of elfbane or a back full of dagger, seemed to him. “You never can tell.”
“No, you can’t,” the elf said, seeming to feel his point had been made.
After that, the evening proceeded convivially enough, ending with several more songs about the heroism, gallantry, and irresistible romantic allure of the elusive Gorash, which Drago might have been a little less cynical about if the bandit hadn’t been so energetically trying to murder him by proxy, and the current king of the Sylvan Marches’ complete lack of any such virtues. Or, indeed, positive qualities of any kind, unless some of the listeners felt that such a single-minded dedication to hedonism was somehow inherently admirable—which, so far as Drago could tell, no one did. The upshot of which was, by the time he and Clearspring left the tavern, he’d had a good deal more to drink than he’d intended, and night had fallen in earnest in the street outside.
“I’ll say this for your friends,” he said, taking a deep breath of cooler air as he hit the thoroughfare, and waited for his head to stop spinning in response, “they know how to have a good time.”
